The Tagline: “An agent on his first assignment. A wife desperate for answers. A system that has changed the rules.â€
The Translation: Vote for Obama.
The Gist: It’s pretty clear that we’re all going to learn a very important lesson from director Gavin Hood’s Rendition when it comes out on October 12, but as we watch this just-released trailer, it’s still unclear what that lesson is. Reese Witherspoon plays the Michelle Williams part — the doting wife whose husband (Omar Metwally) disappears for an extended period of time to carouse with Jake Gyllenhaal — except this time, instead of Brokeback Mountain, it’s Guantánamo Bay! (Metwally is a family man suspected of terrorism, and Gyllenhaal plays the CIA agent assigned to his case.) There are lots of shots of Witherspoon crying, so the film will probably come out against extraordinary rendition, though we can’t say for sure. We find out that Metwally’s been making some sort of phone calls which he can’t explain, and Meryl Streep (playing Dick Cheney, apparently) makes the point that bombings in London were prevented by information gleaned from rendition. Then there’s an explosion. So this is either a film about the importance of preserving our civil liberties, or one about Reese Witherspoon accidentally marrying a terrorist — in which case fuck civil liberties!