Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part one

Dave Calhoun checks out Brian de Palma's 'Redacted' and Tony Gilroy's 'Michael Clayton' at the Italian film festival

The ideas of liberal Hollywood were very much in evidence in Brian de DePalma’s ‘Redacted’ and Tony Gilroy’s ‘Michael Clayton’, two of the first competition films to screen in Venice following the festival’s opening on Wednesday evening with Joe Wright’s ‘Atonement’.

De Palma’s well-meaning but conceptually-flawed faux-documentary, ‘Redacted’ is the first of several American films this autumn to take on the subject of the Iraq war, from Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Stop Loss’ to Peter Berg’s ‘The Kingdom’ (which this critic has seen and can safely say plays like ‘Black Hawk Down’ in the see-through clothing of ‘Syriana’).

‘Redacted’ certainly comes from an interesting place: De Palma has decided to focus on the real story of one US Army company in the Iraqi city of Samarra, one member of which was convicted earlier this month for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. His approach is to recreate episodes from this crime and the soldier's everyday experiences in Iraq using images apparently captured from quotidian film images, whether clips from news reports, a documentary being made in the area by a French film crew, security camera footage, internet footage of soldiers’ wives delivering messages or, and this makes up the bulk of the film, images being filmed almost continuously by one soldier, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a good-natured sort with ambitions to enter film school following his service in the military, who continually annoys his comrades by shoving his camera in their faces.

If Salazar's fortuitous camera-happy attitude sounds a little contrived, that's certainly how it plays in the moment. The look of seemingly fly-on-the-wall footage can sometimes give a story a gritty immediacy - surely what De Palma is seeking - but it can also create an air of improvisation, playfulness and even comedy, and that's what happens too often here - which isn't very helpful when you're trying to convey the real horror of a street-kidnapping or a decapitation. The greatest flaw is that the actors generally aren't up to the task and so don't convince as US soldiers - they play like actors playing US soldiers. Much of the film - bar a compelling episode at a reconstructed US army checkpoint where suspicious cars are checked or, too often, fired upon - has a rushed, unrehearsed air to it. One suspects that De Palma has mistook a lack of preparation with his actors for the path to convincing realism.

You know when George Clooney and Tilda Swinton are both in a film that you should probably resist taking a Starbucks cup into the cinema. Their latest film, written and directed by Tony Gilroy - a writer on all three 'Bourne' movies - and produced by Clooney and Steven Soderburgh's now defunct Section Eight, is a corporate thriller, in which Clooney is the eponymous Michael Clayton, a debt-ridden corporate lawyer who is drawn into a corporate conspiracy when one of his colleagues, played by Tom Wilkinson, goes completely loopy and simultaneously decides to expose the misdoings of a mysterious corporate called U/North (is that short for 'Up North', a business with Yorkshire origins?). As it goes with so many films with an anti-corporate bent attached to standard thriller practices (think of 'The Constant Gardener', although that was a much better film), no one ever bothers to get to grips with what it is that the rogue company is supposed to be doing wrong. A recent review of 'Fast Food Nation' in the New Yorker noted that the left offers better ideas than it does movies, and with these two on the menu at the Venice, I'm inclined to agree, at least when it comes to the American variety.

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