Finally got around to seeing “Redacted” last night, on DVD. The film, if you didn’t know, is written and directed by Brian De Palma, and is a thinkly fictionalized based on the Mahmudiyah killings, the gang-rape, murder, and burning of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in March 2006 by U.S. soldiers, along with murder of her parents and younger sister. The film scored a Silver Lion at Cannes for Best Direction.

It did poor box office, and reviews were mixed. But even when he’s bad, De Palma is interesting: he’s almost obsessive about finding new narrative devices. So I thought I’d give him a chance. It’s been long enought since Black Dahlia.

Nope. Bad, bad movie.

The good news first, although there’s not much. De Palma’s narrative trick this time is to tell the story through footage ostensibly culled from several sources, presumably to enhance the sense of realism. There is no “dramatic” footage: we see home video shot by an American soldier stationed in Samarra, excerts from a French “documentary”, “news” footage, weblog video clips, and lengthy scenes captured by surveillance cameras at the military base. It’s an interesting technique (although Denis Arcand did it better, and more cleverly, in “Stardom”), and thematically a further development of one of Di Palma’s favourite themes - surveillance.

The gimmick doesn’t work, though, straining the viewer’s credulity again and again (wow, how lucky that the amateur cameraman just happened to be shooting the spot where that IED was concealed! Of COURSE you’d bring a home video camera to a rape/murder! Boy, those surveillance cameras sure have terrific sound…picking up a conversation perfectly from yards away. And should they really be discussing the killings right in front of the camera like that?)

A film pretending to be “real” needs strong, unaffected performances and convincingly realistic dialogue. But this film is impossible to believe at just about any level. The characters are one dimensional clichés (the racist, psychotic Southerner, the tough-as-nails-but-loves-his-boys-foul-mouthed-wisecrackin’ black Sarge, the conflicted, moral guy who backs out at the last minute, etc.) without a shred of reality, just placeholders for the “plot”. The dialogue is scripted-trying-to-sound-improv. The villains are irredeemably evil, without a shred of humanity (their names are Rush and Flake); all Iraqis are suffering martyrs, except for the ones that actually cut people’s heads off.

There’s are dozens of interesting themes to be explored in this story - the way that war brutalizes and dehumanizes even a well intentioned invader, the conflict between loyalty and decency, the way our perceptions of this war have been formed and managed. De Palma addressed those themes much more effectively in Casualties of War - Redacted, by contrast, feels cursory, unfinished, and manipulative.

Which raises the question - who did De Palma think his audience was? He is clearly trying to issue a wakeup call here; in interviews, he has spoken of his regret about waiting so long to make a film about Vietnam, and hoping to change some minds this time around before the war ends. But whose minds? Opponents of the war are already aware of the atrocities coming to light; supporters of the war, or the undecided, will simply be repelled by the cartoonish villainy of the murderers, and dismiss this as clumsy anti-war propaganda. Which, unfortunately, it is.

Good intentions, bad film. De Palma joins Michael Moore on my list of “Propagandists Whose Message I Mostly Support But Who Need To Realize That Bad Movies Don’t Sell Ideas.”