A star-making lead performance in ‘The Mauritanian’
It’s often the case that movies based on true stories offer a glimpse of the real-life characters at the end. In “The Mauritanian,” the story of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 14 years behind bars, that real-life footage is the most engaging part of the film.
That’s not entirely the fault of the filmmakers, who do an earnest and thoughtful if less than totally absorbing job of telling Slahi’s story based on the best-selling memoir he wrote in prison, “Guantanamo Diary.”
It’s just that nothing can beat this intimate view of the real man, smiling and singing joyfully to Bob Dylan, no less. One wonders how he even managed to stay sane, let alone joyful, after 14 years at Guantanamo without being formally charged or tried. And in conditions that included a brutal stretch of torture: severe cold, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, a mock drowning, waterboarding, and threats to imprison his own mother at Guantanamo.
Luckily, “The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, gets one thing very right: Tahar Rahim’s masterful central performance. The French actor achieves something his big-name costars — Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — do not, presenting a multi-layered, subtly shaded and deeply moving portrayal that proves hard to forget. Rahim deserves the awards buzz he’s getting; he also deserves more big roles, and soon.
Macdonald is known for documentaries (the Oscar-winning “One Day in September”) as well as features (”The Last King of Scotland”), and “The Mauritanian” has a quasi-documentary feel at times. Partly that’s because there’s a lot of dry information to get across here, namely the ins and outs of Slahi’s legal case. The film tries to achieve this by juxtaposing the stories of defense lawyer Nancy Hollander (Foster), who works to gain Slahi’s release based on lack of evidence, and U.S. military prosecutor Stuart Couch (Cumberbatch.)
“The Mauritanian,” an STX Films release in theaters on Friday, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America.