Prisoner’s ordeal tests viewers’ patience
“The Mauritanian” tells the story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a man that Americans falsely imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years. It is wellmade and has, as its crown jewel, the performance of French actor Tahar Rahim in the title role.
And every aspect of the film, directed by Kevin Macdonald (“Life in a Day 2020”), has a feeling of seriousness and quality.
The only problem is the story itself. It’s a true story, so the screenplay had to stick to the facts, but the facts aren’t very moviefriendly. For one thing, it’s about a guy in prison. It’s hard to make prison dramatic, unless there are conflicts with other prisoners, but Salahi seems to have spent most of his time in some form of solitary confinement.
Outside the prison walls, we do get to see Jodie Foster working on his case. She plays a lawyer from New Mexico named Nancy Hollander, whose mission is to make sure that no one’s constitutional rights are denied, even those of alleged terrorists. Foster imparts to Hollander the confidence and grumpy authority of someone who has been a big shot all her life. It’s hard to know where Foster leaves off and Hollander begins, but in either case, it’s fun to watch her — her wariness, her steeliness, her unwillingness to give anyone an inch.
So there’s pleasure to be had in “The Mauritanian” — though the Hollander scenes aren’t the most riveting cinema, either. She spends a lot of time reading. Or to be more precise, she spends a good portion of the movie requesting documents and the rest of it reading those documents.
The case itself is interesting, but it would probably be even more compelling in a documentary. Salahi was accused of being the mastermind of 9/11. He wasn’t accused of being a fellow traveler, or of acting in an auxiliary capacity, he was thought to be the guy. Basically, if 9/11 were the TateLaBianca murders, he was accused of being Charles Manson.
And he fit the profile: He fought and trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan (though it’s notable that was back when the United States was fighting with the Afghans against the Soviet occupation); he lived in Germany, where the 9/11 plot was hatched; plus, he had a cousin who was involved enough in al Qaeda that he once made a call to Salahi — wait for it — using Osama bin Laden’s cell phone!
It gets even worse. The American authorities, who were torturing terror suspects, would ask suspects about Salahi, and at least in one case, a person gave a false confession implicating Salahi. Salahi himself was tortured (a grueling part of the movie) with sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, waterboarding, sexual humiliation and nonstop loud music. Not surprisingly, he ended up confessing.
As Americans, we deserve to know what’s done in our name; it’s practically a responsibility of citizenship. Thus, a movie like this is useful and serves a positive function. However, a movie about being in prison should be more than marginally more enjoyable than prison itself. Likewise, watching a lawyer at work should be lots more diverting than preparing a brief.
Sure, “The Mauritanian” is better than staring at metal bars and better than two hours of rigorous legal preparation. But it isn’t better by much.
Rahim is the one element that argues against this story as documentary fodder, that suggests that a narrative feature really was the way to go with this material. He’s fascinating to watch, in that he seems a number of things at once: intelligent, downtoearth, slightly unknowable and somewhat innocent. Not innocent as in clearly lacking in guilt, but innocent in aura — open, not cynical; angry, but not bitter. He’s something to see. The movie less so.
But Rahim noses “The Mauritanian” just over the line into the realm of a mild recommendation.