BENDING THE LAW (THE MAURITANIAN)

 

George W Bush opened it.

Barack Obama announced plans to close it but failed to do so in office.

Donald Trump insisted on keeping it and ramping up its operations.

Joe Biden's administration launched a formal review into its future in February.

Guantanamo Bay prison is one the most controversial detention centres in US history.

Based on an Army facility near the coast of Cuba, as of January 2021 it has housed 780 detainees off the US coast.

Of those, 731 have been transferred, 40 remain and nine have died while in custody 

The US Government's indefinite detention of prisoners accused of involvement in Islamic terrorism and its use of torture has been labelled by former President Jimmy Carter as a national embarrassment.

Amnesty International has described it as "a stain" on the country's human rights record.

Supporters of the facility like former Republican White House hopefuls Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio have insisted its very existence has served as a deterrent to fundamentalist terrorists from launching attacks on US soil.

In fact, they have argued that rather than emptying the prison, the US authorities should be filling its cells.

Where you stand on the prison camp will probably colour your view of Kevin McDonald's Golden Globe winning 'The Mauritanian' - a true story about the incarceration of Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Guantanamo in 2002 for 14 years.

Nominated for five BAFTAs and two Golden Globes, Kevin McDonald's film failed to pick up a single Oscar nomination which seems really harsh given Tahar Rahim's compelling central performance as Slahi.

At the start of McDonald's film, Slahi is at a wedding in Mauritania just two months after the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and United 93 on 9/11.

Noting he has been living in Germany where the hijackers came into contact with each other, local police turn up, asking Slahi to accompany them to their station to discuss what he knows about them.

The Americans, he is told are hopping mad about the 9/11 attacks and desperate for information.

As he leaves the celebration, Slahi reassures his mother, played by Baya Belal, everything will be okay.

After all, why would the police allow him to drive to his interrogation?

He will never see her again.

Cut to New Mexico four years later where Jodie Foster's attorney Nancy Hollander is approached in Albuquerque by another lawyer to use her security clearance to confirm for Slahi's family his detention in Guantanamo.

The family have made the request after an article in Der Spiegel claims he is alive and incarcerated there.

Missing for four years from Mauritania and Germany with no official explanation, Hollander is able to confirm Slahi is alive and finds herself drawn into the case, persuading colleagues in her law firm that she be allowed to take it on a pro bono basis.

Hollander recruits Shailene Woodley's associate Teri Duncan to help with the case and they travel to Guantanamo.

However Slahi's case pitches them against Benedict Cumberbatch's military lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch whose superiors are eager to secure the death penalty for the Mauritanian, alleging he was a key recruiter of a cell involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Couch is easily persuaded, as one of the pilots killed in the Twin Towers was a close family friend.

However as the lawyers on both sides dive into the often redacted documents about Slahi's arrest and interrogation, they become increasingly uneasy about the tactics deployed.

Hollander is appalled at how the US Government has been riding roughshod over basic human rights.

Couch is concerned about the withholding of crucial information from his team, fearing it could eventually lead to an embarrassing legal defeat.

Doubts spring up too among the defence team about Slahi's innocence during the course of their compiling of his case.

And that raises fundamental questions about the right of terror suspects to a defence and a fair trial 

As both sets of lawyers try to decipher from the redacted documents what happened to Slahi while in detention and whether the grounds for his imprisonment are dubious, McDonald and his screenwriters MB Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani dramatise the torture he is subjected to from waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual degradation to threats to have his mother detained.

It is a gruelling watch, reminiscent of the brutality meted out to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven in Jim Sheridan's powerful 1993 British miscarriage of justice drama 'In the Name of the Father'.

Like Sheridan's film, the power of McDonald's film resides in its depiction of the torture its lead character is subjected to.

Fortunately Rahim, who made quite a name for himself in Jacques Audiard's gripping 2009 French prison drama 'A Prophet,' is well up to the task of engaging our sympathies.

He delivers an excellent performance of Kafkaesque proportions as the full extent of the horror Slahi encounters unfolds.

Rahim's performance is so strong it towers over the rest of the cast.

Foster, Cumberbatch and Woodley do a decent job in their supporting roles but their characters do not have the same dramatic scope that Rahim enjoys.

Zachary Levi does what is required of him as Neil Buckland who Couch believes holds access to vital information upon which the success of the case may hinge, while David Fynn relishes the role of Kent, an official tasked with redacting the classified information given to Hollander and Duncan.

However none of the cast can match the potency of Rahim's performance because the material is simply not there to enable them grab some of the kudos.

Tonally, McDonald's film follows the same beats of other miscarriage of justice movies - although the depiction of the brutality Slahi is exposed to veers into the realm of torture horror.

If there is disappointment, it is that McDonald and his cinematographer Alwin H Kuchler's visuals are quite flat and only seem to come to life during the torture sequences.

McDonald's career as a director was built upon his Oscar winning 1999 documentary about the Munich Olympics terror attack 'One Day in September' and the compelling 2003 climbing tale 'Touching the Void'.

Even his work as a feature director from 2006's Ugandan drama 'The Last King of Scotland' to 2009's big screen reworking of the BBC series 'State of Play' to his 2014 submarine thriller 'Black Sea' has felt rooted in the journalistic, realist filmmaking tradition.

Ever the documentarian, McDonald cannot resist showing footage of the real Slahi at the end of the movie, savouring the lyrics of Bob Dylan's 'The Man In Me' and presenting the two lawyers with necklaces in recognition of their efforts to secure his freedom.

The footage only underscores how great Rahim's performance is and how he has been robbed of a Best Actor Oscar nomination that he thoroughly deserved.

His omission highlights the continued uneasiness of a lot of people in the United States and the West feel about Guantanamo.

Maybe the fact that it is still operating means Guantanamo is just too raw for Academy voters.

That disquiet is likely to linger for generations, even if the Biden administration stops its use as a detention centre.

However close it must if the West is ever going to heal the divisions stoked with the Muslim World before and after 9/11.

('The Mauritanian' was released in US cinemas on February 12, 2021 and was made available for streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK and Ireland on April 1, 2021)

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