2 Venice films look at Iraq war horrors

Two Hollywood films that take up the politics of the Iraq war grew out of the conviction that the American public was not getting the full picture of the violence.

Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah," starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, focuses on the psychological scars that haunt returning soldiers and provides a powerful commentary on how society is treating veterans and their families.

Brian De Palma says he wants to stop the war with his film, "Redacted" by exposing a wider audience to images of horror that he says are not being delivered by the mainstream media.

With Vietnam, "we saw pictures of the destruction and the sorrow of the people who were traumatized. We saw the soldiers ... being brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war," De Palma told a news conference Friday. One of his previous films, "Casualties of War," dealt with the Vietnam war.

The title, "Redacted," is a term meaning edited that is often used when sensitive material is expunged, or blacked out, from a document.

De Palma's film, inspired by material he found on the Internet, is shot on video to present the film as though it were a series of clips that could be downloaded to your computer. Inspired by actual events, the movie tells the fictionalized story of a group of young soldiers who rape a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, kill her family and then shoot her.

De Palma said he wanted to examine how the soldiers had gone so wrong. The movie doesn't present the judicial resolution, but it does show one soldier who came forward being treated with hostility by the military, in contrast to the more comfortable interrogations of the two main perpetrators.

In reality, four soldiers have been convicted in the case that inspired the film and handed sentences of up to 110 years in prison. A fifth man, who left the Army before being charged, faces a federal death penalty trial. The case has received wide media coverage.

The filmmakers had to negotiate a "legal minefield" to present real events as fiction, De Palma said, and the film opens with a disclaimer, which is slowly blacked out. The final scene is a montage of real-life photographs of Iraqi war dead, including maimed and dead women and children, their eyes blacked out on the advice of lawyers because the film used actors and is not a documentary.

"The irony of 'Redacted' is that it was redacted," De Palma said.

While De Palma said he wants the film to help stop the war, Haggis said he tried to keep his own well-known anti-war politics off the screen.

"I felt I owed it to the audience to put that aside, to tell the story ... and let them decide," Haggis told reporters Saturday ahead of his movie's premiere.

Haggis said he also was driven by an absence from the Iraqi war of the sort of images that shocked the public into opposing the Vietnam war.

"I think that when that doesn't happen, it's the responsibility of the artist to ask those questions," said Haggis, who won an Oscar for 2002's "Crash."

In the film, Jones plays Hank Deerfield, the father of a U.S. soldier who disappears just days after returning from a tour in Iraq. A former soldier himself, he drives across the country to find out what happened to his son and learns hard truths about his son's Iraq tour, while challenging some of his own long-held ideals. Charlize Theron plays a New Mexico police detective drawn into the investigation.

Both movies explore how exposure to war — both its horrors and its endless tense hours of patrol and manning roadblocks — desensitizes soldiers to violence, and how that triggers even more tragedy.

Haggis' film takes a very hard look at how society is responding, including in a tight subplot. Early on, the wife of an Iraqi veteran reports to local police her husband's violent drowning of the family's Doberman in the bathtub. Theron's detective refers the woman to the local U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, saying "crimes against dogs are particularly hard to prosecute."

Later, she answers a call where the woman, too, has been drowned in the bathtub.

Inevitably, the film is political, acknowledged Haggis. "All films are political when your country is at war," he said.

"Redacted," which opens in the United States in December, premiered Friday here, and "In the Valley of Elah," making its U.S. opening in coming weeks, premiered Saturday.