About halfway through Gavin Hood’s Rendition, Peter Sarsgaard’s dweeby US congressman’s assistant approaches Meryl Streep’s white witch of the CIA with enough huff-and-puff to blow down a Dairy Queen ice cream outlet. The two ideological opposites go at it crisply and coolly: he promises to send her a copy of the constitution while she promises him a copy of the 9/11 report will arrive in his mailbox post haste. It is sloganeering at its finest and that is not the half of it.

CIA watchdog Corrine Whitman (Streep) sets up the titular ‘rendition’ when evidence is uncovered against Chicago family man and chemical engineer Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian by birth. Whitman suspects that El-Ibrahimi had a hand in the recent bombing of an unnamed North African tea house: an attempt on the life of North African security head Fawal (Igal Naor). Fawal heads the ‘interrogation’ with CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) there as counsel while they electrocute, drown, beat, and strangle Anwar to give up information on the attack.

Soon enough, Anwar’s pregnant wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) begins stirring the pot with her ex-flame and senator’s aide, Alan Smith (Sarsgaard). As a happy coincidence, Freeman’s conscience kicks in at the same time after he realizes Anwar truly knows nothing about the attacks and he gets ready to hightail it out of the prison with the Egyptian. Meanwhile, Fawal’s daughter spends her nights kissing an extremist preparing to avenge his brother, the victim of one of the security chief’s prior interrogations.

The film is seductively shot by the great Dion Beebe (Collateral; Miami Vice) as Hood moves from very personal terrain (Tsotsi) to a globe-spanning human rights drama. The transition, at times daunting and inexcusably partisan, shows Hood as an assured director in the thick of multiple narratives. He tightly winds each scene and brings out the strengths in Kelley Sane’s skin-deep script: there is a solid scaffolding in Sane’s pages, but the script has no ear for the emotional maelstrom swirling among these characters, giving the actors very little to work with. The performances vary from passable to steadfast, but Naor, brooding with the weight of tradition and responsibility, steals the film.

The story’s title comes from the term ‘extraordinary rendition’, a buzzword dreamt up during the Clinton administration to describe the US government’s secret extradition of terrorist suspects to other countries to weasel around civil liberties. Whereas Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana found fault with liberals and conservatives alike, Rendition blindly believes in one ending that will rightly crown those righteous who stand against torture and persecution.

Towards the latter half, the film goes so far as to presuppose that if people were to merely read about the torture and mistreatment of an innocent, it would change things for the better – in many ways, Rendition can be best described as a fantasy.

Chris Cabin