The Impenetrable Fog Of War (from This Is Local London)

Redacted (15)
***
Dir: Brian De Palma
With: Patrick Carroll, Izzy Diaz, Rob Devaney

Watch the trailer here

If Vietnam was the first television war, the conflict that began on September 11, 2001, is the first one fought by multimedia means. Governments, terrorists, press, bloggers, mobile phone-wielding citizen journalists - whether by traditional or hi-tech methods, everyone is an information trader now. But whose message can we trust? When it comes to the Iraq war in particular, is any source reliable?

These are among the questions posed by Redacted, Brian De Palma's provocative new film. To say the director of Scarface, The Untouchables, Blow Out, and his equally hard-hitting Vietnam drama, Casualties of War, has turned in a controversial movie is to say Disney made moderately good cartoons. Redacted is a roar from the heart, a bold, swaggering, inspired work that means to get a reaction. There lies the problem. De Palma tries so frantically to blow away the fog of war he ends up creating more of the stuff to stumble through.

After opening with a declaration that the film is entirely fiction, words are blocked out, military censorship style, to leave the letters that form the film's title. The redacting, or editing, has begun. Another announcement appears. This one states that Redacted "visually documents imagined events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra". (For the record, the incident which moved De Palma to make the film occurred in Mahmoudiya).

Over the course of 90 minutes, almost a dozen sources provide their take on these "imagined events". The most important contributor, and one of the most likeable characters in the movie, is private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz). Salazar is making a video diary which he hopes will be his ticket into film school, in the same way as the Army was his passage from poverty back home.

Salazar's interviews with fellow grunts show a band of men lethally bored and desperate to get home. They are a mixed bunch of crudely sketched types - the joker (Salazar), the bookworm, the family guy, and those who are clearly mad, bad and dangerous to know. Among the latter is the rookie patrolman Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll). Flake draws deep and often from the well of offensiveness, at one point likening the killing of Iraqis to "stomping cockroaches".

The next lens to focus on the company belongs, supposedly, to a French documentary crew. They film an incident at a checkpoint during which a pregnant woman is shot. As she is driven to hospital, an Arabic news channel reports the story, and so the information bandwagon begins to roll. The viewer also sees events through the window of a terrorist website, a video blog by a soldier's wife, and so on. De Palma is lining up his sources, ready for the incident that forms the film's core.

Handed so many perspectives, the audience is encouraged to think it has the inside track on what is happening. While the characters are caught up in the chaos on the ground, we are the cool, detached directors in the viewing gallery, taking clips from one version of the story, adding details from another, and splicing in our own prejudices and knowledge. As in Blow Out, the viewer needs to stay sharp.

Technically, Redacted is a remarkable achievement. More than this, it's a clever way to illustrate the notion of a free press - namely, that the untramelled flow of information is the best guarantee against lies and tyranny. It's just a pity that in presenting his own case in such an obviously over-the- top and incredible way, De Palma undermines the very message he's trying to get across.

Take, for instance, the section where an embedded TV crew goes on a raid with US soldiers. Doors booted in, women handled roughly, children screaming - it doesn't defy belief that such things happen, but it stretches credulity that the military would allow such a mission to be filmed.

Then there are the images, labelled "actual photographs from the Iraq war", which end the movie. The mind is appalled, the heart heavy at the real-life carnage on display, much of it inflicted on children. But then among the pictures is one featuring an injured, pregnant woman who looked to this viewer like the same one shot at the checkpoint. Was this deliberate blurring between fact and fiction one last warning by De Palma not to trust anything we see?

Any dramatised version of real events should come with a health warning in letters 60ft high. As the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield demonstrated so ably in his recent Iraq film, Battle For Haditha, it can be a powerful way of connecting the viewer to victims. To work effectively it has to be done in a balanced fashion, otherwise the sceptical viewer rightly begins to question what they are seeing.

Like other writer-directors now taking up the subject, De Palma clearly wants to make audiences take note of what is going on in Iraq. A noble intention, but in this case the shock tactics work against his cause.

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