Is there anything of significance that we don’t already know about Guantanamo Bay? Is there room for yet another film depicting the inhumane treatment of prisoners there? These are the questions facing us when we are confronted with Mauritanian, based on the memoirs of Mohamedou Salahi, a Mauritanian who was held there for some time without any formal charges. The short answer is yes, if only for what is revealed at the very end of the movie.
Tahar Rahim (A Prophet, The Past) plays Salahi. He is picked up from his family home in Mauritania, as part of the crackdown to find the culprits after 9/11, and the next we see him is as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. Director Kevin Macdonald plants the seeds of doubt regarding Salahi’s guilt or innocence right from the start as we see him deleting all the contacts on his mobile phone before going away with the police. Why did he do that if he was innocent? Macdonald and his team of scriptwriters feed us the information in drips to keep us guessing till the end.
A renowned criminal defence lawyer Nancy Hollander takes up Salahi’s case. She is played by Jodie Foster, an actress who reminds us of our history of watching films. We saw her matured beyond her years as Iris, a 15 year old hooker in Taxi Driver (1976) and marveled at her controlled performance as Clarice Starling an FBI agent confronting Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1991), for which she nabbed her second Oscar at the age of 28. In The Mauritanian we see the 57 year old Foster, a fully matured actress at the summit of her profession. When she walks past the cells in Guantanamo to see her client, it is as though we’ve gone back in time and are watching Clarice Starling again.
The film does not follow a linear storyline and constantly shifts in time and location between Guantanamo Bay, USA and Mauritania. When we first see Salahi, he seems in good spirits and not too uncomfortable. His treatment at the hands of his US interrogators is revealed later and we see just enough of it as to not test our patience in watching harrowing scenes.
The prosecutor is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I think this is a case of serious miscasting. Though Cumberbatch does a serviceable southern accent and is convincing later in the film when he begins to have doubts about the validity of the case against Salahi, he is fatally unconvincing as someone whose best buddy was killed in the attack on the World Trade Centre and is hell bent on obtaining the death sentence for the suspected perpetuator. This role required someone like Matthew McConaughey.
Kevin Macdonald made his names in documentary films. One Day in September about the fatal attack on Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics, which he directed, was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1999. His feature films such as The Last King of Scotland (2006) have a documentary feel to them. The problem with The Mauritanian is that Macdonald has tried to cram so much information, historical background and story within 129 minutes that there has been very little room left to develop and flesh out the characters. The main fault lies with the script. No less than three scriptwriters are credited with adapting Salahi’s book for the screen and it looks as though it is a case of too many cooks. The only character which has been given sufficient flesh and bone for us to empathize with him is Salahi, helped greatly by Tahar Rahim’s utterly believable performance.
Despite its flaws, The Mauritanian deserves to be seen. It reveals ugly truths about how the greatest democracy in the world trampled all over human rights in the name of justice. It further shows that whether it was a Republican or Democrat administration, the policy did not change much. The film really finds its stride towards the end where it delivers a knockout punch which makes the whole journey worthwhile.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.