The Mauritanian (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

In 2001 only two months after 9/11, Mohamedou Ould Salahi was arrested at his home in Mauritania. After the authorities, desperate for justice, traded him around a bit, he found himself a prisoner at the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Although he was never formally charged with a crime, and only circumstantial evidence even marginally related him to one of the hijackers, Salahi was held there for fourteen years, tortured for information he did not know. It's an horrific story, one that lends itself well to a cinematic medium, especially carried by such a stellar group of actors. It's also a distinctly manipulative screenplay by writers M.B. Traven, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani, more or less the kind of "dear reader" pathos structured into an equally manipulative courtroom drama. Told in this way, the film must be inevitably compared to other, less timely, dramas, and found wanting as a result.

That's not to say the story isn't as interesting as the previous times we've heard it, on the news and never more than when Salahi's whistleblowing account of his time at Guantanamo Bay was published, heavily redacted by the government. After an initial sequence of Salahi's arrest, the film jumps to 2005, when a concerned lawyer named Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) decides to defend Salahi and either get him charged or released. As she goes through the process of entering the detention camp, I couldn't help but feel that the film was hinting at the similar introductory sequence to her character in The Silence of the Lambs; she enters a warren of nightmarish holding cells, most of the base obscured by hanging tarps and stone walls, stripped of potential weapons, and advised to wear a head scarf. She's primed to fear and dehumanize the man she's promised to help, and through Foster's eyes you can see the unspoken battle of wills in her mind.

Joining her is Teri (Shailene Woodley), an associate who has never seen anything like this. During the course of their research, and visits to Salahi (played by a brilliant Tahar Rahim), the two women constantly fight red tape, analyze redacted documents, and slowly but surely seek to rectify the wrongs done not just to their client but to all the inmates. In this way, the film often feels a little out of time; the now publicly known problem that was Guantanamo Bay -- essentially a brutish and brutal prison of torture and total lack of oversight -- is the villain here, but its human rights violations have been the subject of scrutiny for years. One can only guess that the filmmakers, whose project was greenlit in late 2019, felt inspired after the 45th president signed an executive order to keep the prison open indefinitely. Now, however, President Biden's administration has publicly planned to close the prison. Hopefully this movie will add to the support for that plan.

Perhaps the most interesting character arc in the film comes from Benedict Cumberbatch as the Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, representing the U.S. government even as he becomes disillusioned and disturbed by the information coming out about Guantanamo Bay. His is the proverbial fall from grace, and his oaths are put to the test as the government's crimes are finally spoken in courts of law. But, interesting as he is and effective as Cumberbatch makes him, he feels a little too thinly written; actually, I'd say all the characters in this movie -- specific as they are, nominally -- are little more than archetypes. Bouncing off each other in familiar ways, the stakes are never particularly high. Even if you don't remember this story blaring from the morning news years ago, you instinctively know how this story will progress, regress, turn, and end. While that's not a negative quality in any film, much less one that recounts real events, it does make The Mauritanian surprisingly dull viewing.

But, bland and trite as it feels in retrospect, there is a lot to appreciate in this film. Not only is its earnest attempt to vindicate Salahi's name and life a more than worthy cause -- and, I think, largely succeeds, emotional manipulations aside -- but it features really wonderful performances and a few interesting aesthetic choices as well. Lengthy flashback sequences, especially near the film's end, depict Salahi's many years of torment in the prison. These are largely presented in boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, isolating the frame and cueing us to see Salahi as trapped and under a microscope. It's arguably unnecessary, as the climactic sequence is a lengthy and particularly violent series of horrors much like we saw in Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate; and its placement as the climax feels extremely exploitative and sentimental at the same time. But the layers of mindful, if heavy-handed, direction makes the film immediately accessible to average viewers who may have no idea what they're in for.