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By Cole Smithey

‘Rendition’

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After overblown stories of walkouts by critics during its Toronto film festival debut, “Rendition” proves to have enough substance, momentum and drama to validate its entertainment value as a politically charged thriller.

Reese Witherspoon plays Isabella, the pregnant wife of Egyptian American Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a chemical engineer who gets abducted by U.S. Special Forces on suspicion of terrorism upon his return from a business convention in South Africa. El-Ibrahimi is secreted to a North African dungeon where local police kingpin Abasi (Yigal Naor) gleefully tortures him with the tacit assistance of CIA cat’s paw Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who survived the suicide bombing that gave rise to El-Ibrahimi’s abduction.

Isabella discovers duty-free charges on her husband’s credit card that refute the airline’s claim that El-Ibrahimi was never on his return flight, and visits former college friend Alan (Peter Sarsgaard) in Washington D.C. where he now works as an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin). Running parallel to Isabella’s quest to locate her missing husband, and the barbarous abuse he suffers abroad, is the back story of the suicide bombing, of which El-Ibrahimi is suspected of being involved, as it relates to Abasi’s romantically confused daughter who mistakenly dates a terrorist.

Audiences concerned that “Rendition” errs on the side of bleeding-heart liberals can take solace in the film’s willingness to cast blame for the origin of “extraordinary rendition,” as part of U.S. government policy, on former President Clinton. Humanitarians will find encouragement in the film’s scathing tone that takes aim at the very nature of torture, secret or otherwise, as an impotent method for discovering facts. Gyllenhaal’s increasingly sensitive CIA agent does some impressive thematic dart throwing by quoting Shakespeare on the subject in the third act, lest anyone forget that the subject of torture has been well chewed over by stronger minds in history.

Suspicion is a powerful deceiver that turns a quick circle back to its creator. At the helm of the CIA rendition program is Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) a brainwashed black widow ideologue whose views on terrorism prevention ironically align with Abasi’s limited sense of justice. Director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”) does a serviceable job with upstart screenwriter Kelley Sane’s written-on-the-wall script. And although supporting cast members Arkin and Streep suffer from underwritten roles, the actors appropriately emphasize their characters’ egos as guiding beacons of damning hubris. They are people who live in self-promoted private hells that they are only too happy to impose others in the form of living nightmares.

“Rendition” comes out in a season of R-word film titles (see “Redacted” and “Reservation Road”) set to assault cinema marquees with bloody threads of alliteration. What these films share in common is the death of young people by mechanized forces. Cars, bullets and bombs dismantle callow human life with an abstract force and logic that most people can comprehend, if not rationalize, in a way that lets those responsible off the hook. “Rendition” is the best of the three movies because it’s a humanitarian film rather than a political one even if that subtext is present. It might not rise to the complexity of “Syriana” but “Rendition” isn’t a flimsy movie either. CV

‘Michael Clayton’

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Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a contracted back-of-the-house “fixer” at Kenner, Bach and Ledeen, one of Manhattan’s largest corporate law firms. He’s the guy sent out at midnight to the Westchester mansion of some rich bastard desperately looking for a way out of a hit-and-run car accident that left a pedestrian in an unknown state of physical harm. A recent divorce and a huge debt from a personal investment deal gone awry has left Michael consumed with repairing his own unraveled life. But this ethically equivocal character is cut from hickory, not pine. Michael is a doer, not a worrier. “I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor” is the line he uses to keep his self image in check. But there’s also a bit of the dreamer in Michael, and it’s a characteristic that saves his life during a harrowing scene that acts as a reference point for the story.

Screenwriter Tony Gilroy (“The Devil’s Advocate” and “The Bourne Supremacy”) makes his directorial debut with the assistance of pedigreed producers and executive producers that include Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella. The list of Academy Award-nominated names set a cultivated tone for a scathing corporate thriller that emanates from the same narrative petri dish that spawned films like “The Parallax View” and “The China Syndrome.” The point of view in “Michael Clayton” is appropriately more alienated than that of those dated films, but is nonetheless rooted in the reality of a corporation’s tendency to chew up and spit out humanity in the name of quarterly profit gains.  

Michael’s boss Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) is on the brink of inking an out-of-court settlement with plaintiffs poisoned by a weed-killing product made by U/North, an agrichemical company that Bach’s firm represents. After six years of working around the clock to protect U/North, Kenner, Bach and Ledeen’s best litigator, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) suffers a nervous breakdown during a deposition. His freak out is the stuff of legend. Recorded for posterity on videotape, Arthur inexplicably disrobes in the conference room before running naked into the parking lot. It’s an act of self-sabotage that has U/North’s Machiavellian in-house counsel chief Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) looking at Michael to repair in the quickest way possible.  

Arthur’s ensuing epiphany and attempt to sabotage the U/North lawsuit he has worked so hard to build hits at a depth of self-realization rarely alluded to on screen, and Wilkinson’s performance is nothing short of astounding. It’s not a far stretch to suppose that Oscar season might include Wilkinson’s name in its list of nominees.  

The high stakes of corporate warfare dictate that Karen orders full surveillance of Arthur’s phone, apartment and whereabouts. She doesn’t stop there. Swinton’s character represents a sexless ambitious female swimming in the shark-infested waters of the male-dominated corporate domain. We watch her prepare for a speech in her hotel bathroom mirror while putting on make-up. The translucently layered scene captures Swinton, the actor, plotting her delivery and Karen, practicing the subtlety of every word she will speak. In the next second we see Karen paraphrasing the rehearsed lines in a boardroom she commands with every syllable. It is the clarion voice of a gangster. “Michael Clayton” is an up-to-the-minute allegory about the devastating power and malicious intent of a corporation that conceals its unethical actions with television commercials featuring close-ups of verdant nature. The film is also a Clooney vehicle in the vein of “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Syriana.” Clooney’s commitment to creating a cinema of social responsibility carries with it an infectious passion and integrity. He has assembled an easily identifiable brand that hits a consistent watermark of reliable quality. Clooney helps finance his vision with money from lowest common denominator movies like the “Oceans” franchise. It seems an ethical price to pay for films like “Michael Clayton” to be made. CV

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