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As Michael Winterbottom's exhilarating, infuriating The Road to
Guantanamo comes to an end, one of its protagonists delivers an extraordinarily
clear-eyed summation of his horrific experiences as a prisoner held without charges for
two years by the United States: "The world," he says, "is not a nice
place."
The Tipton Three were young British Muslims, absolutely Western and
secular, who went to Pakistan for a wedding just after September 11. On an adventurous
whim (which Winterbottom, eschewing character development in favor of a visceral barrage
of incident, fails to explain), the boys cross the border into Afghanistan just as the
United States bombing campaign is at its most intense. It's a titanic mistake - what might
have looked from a distance like fun (two weeks in a Hemingway novel) is near-starvation
and the constant threat of death when seen up close. Herded from city to city, trying to
survive attacks from all sides, they are eventually captured by the Northern Alliance.
The boys are accused of working with the Taliban and are shuttled from
jail to jail (just evading a faceless death in a mass execution along the way), eventually
landing in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. The film suggests a horrific amalgam of
Hieronymus Bosch and Franz Kafka. In Afghanistan, bombs obliterate whole villages, friends
disappear (or sit stunned at a roadside, drenched in blood), they're piled into trucks in
desert heat with no water or food for days at a time and trigger happy soldiers march them
at gun point. In Cuba, they're held without being charged in a cage for years, tortured,
with no access to legal counsel, accused of crimes they did not commit and are unable to
refute.
Winterbottom, working here with co-director Mat Whitecross, has
perfected his hybrid of documentary and fiction. The film leaps seamlessly from
contemporary interviews with the Tipton Three to reenactments of their experiences to news
footage from Al Jazeera and the BBC. The fictional material is meticulously crafted to
appear caught in the moment: handheld, deliberately rough, the digital video image
breaking up in long shot. The film is paced and edited like a news special, and in fact,
there is no indication in the film as to whether any of its disparate sections are
"real." (In the hands of a filmmaker this adept, the effect is brilliantly
effective propaganda, though it gives pause to consider what an equally gifted apologist
for the Bush administration might put together using the same methodology.) Its primary
aesthetic misstep is the pounding music that overwhelms its opening and closing sections,
imparting melodrama and bombast to a story that needs none.
Filling the cast with unknown actors and nonprofessionals, Winterbottom
builds on the innovations of In This
World, creating a style of acting so naturalistic and uninflected that it plays
as documentary. (The interviews with the actual Tipton Three that drive the narrative are,
if anything, more actorly than the performances in the reenactments.) As in the previous
film, there's no interest in the psychological details of character that encourage
identification.
The characters are briefly sketched in (occasional flashbacks to their
lives in Britain serve mainly to underscore their youth and their saturation in Western
pop culture - these are "Taliban" who get captured wearing Gap sweatshirts), the
better to serve as touchstones for the larger political argument. The film is ultimately
less concerned with what drove these three young men than with the criminality of
Guantanamo. In fact, the film might be even more effective if the protagonists were Al
Queda operatives rather than Westerners caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It
might be easier to make an audience feel outrage that innocents are held without being
charged, but it's just as offensive to hold the guilty in subhuman, extralegal
circumstances.
No other director with access to studio distribution channels is doing
anything like this. Winterbottom is working so quickly (he's made twelve films in the last
ten years) and in such an array of styles (he's made literary adaptations, experiments in
journalistic fiction/documentary fusion, a Western, broad comedies, quiet domestic dramas)
that he's been on top of the political and cultural zeitgeist for years now. He brings to
mind no one as much as Godard in the early sixties, effortlessly tossing off movies that
seem both prescient and completely of their moment. The Road to Guantanamo debuts
in the U.S. just weeks after a round of inmate suicides has brought international
attention to the prison yet again; that such an effective piece of agitprop could be
making the rounds at a moment where it could actually effect public opinion is
astonishing.
- Gary Mairs
