Too much outrage
The Mauritanian
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Duration: 2h 9m
Available: Friday in select cinemas and March 2
on demand
When the book Guantanamo Diary came out in 2015, the controversy over the detention of terrorist suspects in the U.S. military prison on the coast of Cuba had already been raging for 12 years.
And the author of that bestselling memoir, Mohamedou Ould Salahi, had been imprisoned there for 13. Salahi wouldn’t be released until October 2016, after serving 14 years without ever being formally charged.
And so the arrival of The Mauritanian, the buzzy new prestige drama by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September), based on Salahi’s book, comes nearly two decades after the arrest of Salahi that opens the film. (Police took him into custody in his homeland of Mauritania on Nov. 20, 2001, on suspicion of helping to recruit the 9/11 hijackers for al-qaida.) In the interim, there have been a slew of documentaries about the mistreatment and torture of Guantanamo detainees, the most notable being Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning 2007 exposé, Taxi to the Dark Side. Which gives The Mauritanian an unfortunate burden we might call outrage fatigue. Despite a powerful performance by Tahar Rahim in the title role, and despite marquee names Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in the supporting roles of Salahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, and Stuart Couch, the Marine lawyer assigned to prosecute him — despite scenes of grotesque abuse that inflame the conscience — the movie lands, through no fault of its own other than timing, with a whiff of been-there, donethat.
The year 2020 was a dumpster fire of indignation over the mishandling of the pandemic response, racial injustice and unfounded claims of widespread fraud in the U.S. election that have deepened the open wounds of political division.
Is it any wonder it’s hard to muster even more anger about something we’ve been screaming about for two decades?
That no criticism of Rahim, who delivers a memorable and intense performance, bringing a sense of wit and humour that is, at times, hard to fathom for one so mistreated. He generates sympathy for his character, even considering the ambiguity, for much of the narrative, about his guilt. (Salahi had confessed, but also passed a lie-detector test after he recanted.) Foster and Cumberbatch leave a less indelible impression, playing characters who come across as more brittle and testy than morally resolute (Foster), and for a prosecutor who balked at using a confession he believed was tainted, inadmissibly, by torture — as more sanctimonious than saintly (Cumberbatch).
If it were fiction and not fact, it might have benefited from the familiar trajectory of a legal thriller, culminating in a surprise verdict vindicating the righteous.
But that’s not the way things happened. Most of its running time takes us only up to the 2010 decision challenging the basis of Salahi’s detention. There’s another six years of story to be told, dispensed within an epilogue of anticlimactic onscreen titles. ∏∏∏