It also asks the audience to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too. There's a decency in this, but also a naivety and a moral equivalence: beneath the tangled web, there's a simple fence-sitting need for balance at all costs.
In terms of star status and empathy, Reese Witherspoon is here probably first among equals, playing Isabella, the heavily pregnant wife of an Egyptian-born chemical engineer, Anwar El-Ibrahimi Omar Metwally. On the most debatable evidence, Anwar is suspected of aiding a suicide-bombing cell in a country specified in the script only as "north Africa" and whose horrible handiwork we see in the opening scene, fatefully killing an American intelligence agent, among dozens of other "north Africans".
Anwar is snatched on his way back to Chicago from an innocuous business meeting and, hooded and shackled, finds himself in a prison cell in that same vaguely delineated country.
All this is on the orders of CIA dragon lady Corrine Whitman, played by Meryl Streep with much pursing of lips and removal of reading glasses. She's a badass patriot, contemptuous of the surrender-monkeys and her attitude is not so much take no prisoners, but take loads of prisoners and ship them out to the developing world for toenail-removal. The prisoner's wife, Isabella, finds herself in the painful position of having to beg for help from ambitious senatorial aide Alan Smith Peter Sarsgaard the former boyfriend whose heart she broke by getting married to Anwar in the first place.
Corrine Whitman : Honey, this is nasty business. There are upwards of 7, people in central London alive tonight, because of information that we elicited just this way. So maybe you can put your head on your pillow and feel proud for saving one man while 7, perish, but I got grandkids in London, so I'm glad I'm doing this job Sign In.
Play trailer Drama Thriller. Director Gavin Hood. Kelley Sane. Top credits Director Gavin Hood. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Rendition Trailer. Clip Featurette Interview Photos Top cast Edit.
Simmons Lee Mayer as Lee Mayer. Mounir Margoum Rani as Rani. Driss Roukhe Bahi as Bahi. Gavin Hood. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. If there is one thing history and common sense teach us, it is that if you torture someone well enough, they will tell you what they think you want to hear.
As successful interrogation experts have patiently explained to Congress, much more useful information is obtained using the carrot than the stick. Yet Anwar is held naked in a dungeon, beaten, nearly drowned, shocked with electricity, kept sleepless, shackled. Does it occur to anybody that he is more likely to "confess" if he is not a terrorist than if he is?
The movie sets into motion a chain of events caused by the illegal kidnapping. Isabella, played by Witherspoon with single-minded determination and love, contacts an old boyfriend Peter Sarsgaard who is now an aide to a powerful senator Alan Arkin. Convinced the missing man is innocent, the senator intervenes with the head of U.
She responds in flawless neocon-speak, simultaneously using terrorism as an excuse for terrorism and threatening the senator with political suicide.
Arkin backs off. Meanwhile, in the unnamed foreign country, we meet a CIA pencil-pusher named Douglas Freeman Jake Gyllenhaal , who has little experience in field work but has taken over the post after the assassination of his boss.
His job is to work with and "supervise" the torturer Abasi. This he does with no enthusiasm but from a sense of duty. He is not cut out for this kind of work, drinks too much, broods, has discussions with Abasi, who is an intelligent man and not a monster. How this all plays out has much to do with Abasi's daughter, Fatima Zineb Oukach , who is secretly in love with a fellow student not approved of by her family. I beg to differ. I was pleasantly surprised by this Hollywood take on one of the nastier side effects of the "war on terror," which stars Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal.
OK, there was a formulaic happy ending, but the film also managed to combine the engrossing aspects of a thriller with valid questions about the morality - and effectiveness - of torture. The story it tells is not dissimilar to the case of Maher Arar , a Canadian who was the victim of "extraordinary rendition" in Meryl Streep was fun to watch as a US intelligence officer, but the strongest story line - complete with some excellent performances - came courtesy of a North African subplot about the daughter of a local intelligence boss who falls in love with a suicide bomber who is attempting to kill her father.
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