Fact blends with fiction in docudrama
The Road to Guantánamo
.
It is becoming hard to escape the certainty that America is no longer the gold standard of liberty and justice it once was.
Set in the early days of American involvement in Afghanistan, the incendiary docudrama
The Road to Guantánamo
is a frappe of documentary interviews, dramatizations and actual news footage courtesy of Al-Jazeera. British directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat
***image1***
Whitecross combine these elements to tell the story of a group of British friends-the "Tipton Three"-who wound up, through a Kafkaesque series of events, imprisoned at the American military prison.
When their friend Asif (Arfan Usman) travels back home to Pakistan to be married, his twentysomething friends-Ruhel (Farhad Harun), Monir (Waqar Siddiqui) and Shafiq (Riz Ahmed)-travel with him from their comfortable homes in Tipton, England. They abandon their Diesel and Adidas, don skullcaps and tunics and drop in at mosques like any dopey Western kid going "native" and trying on another lifestyle for size.
When an imam at a mosque urges his followers to travel to Afghanistan "to help," the four men hit the road, though the film remains frustratingly vague about just what kind of "help" they were hoping to offer. The four easily cross the border into Afghanistan, but once there are swept up in an exodus of Taliban fighters escaping Northern Alliance bombs. They are suddenly guilty by association. From there, the film moves at a furious clip as the horror of their circumstances escalates.
The trio-minus Monir, who has disappeared-eventually end up in American hands. These young men have the tremendously bad fortune of touring a volatile Afghanistan in the midst of America's terrorist dragnet. They're taken from the frying pan of a brutal American base in Kandahar into the fire of Guantánamo, where they would be imprisoned for two years. There they are kept in chain-link, open-air cages and treated like kennel dogs. They are subjected to bizarrely ritualistic control techniques: Soldiers in riot gear appear when they get out of hand, heavy metal music combined with solitary confinement are used to break their will and interrogation and physical restraint are all employed, along with the now-iconic dehumanization device of sacks placed over their heads.
As these images build up, it becomes clear that years of American cinema caricaturing Nazis as machinelike sadists and Third World soldiers as corrupt, undisciplined slobs have
***image2***
come back to haunt us. Winterbottom and Whitecross present the American military in similarly hyperbolic terms as motley and roguish, full of unshaven, chubby, undisciplined soldiers who might as well be the cigar-chomping desperadoes of some banana republic.
It is too bad Winterbottom stymies a worthwhile effort to reveal the horrible human rights abuses conducted in the name of the antiterrorist campaign with his oddly salacious, TV-drama style. The film probably would have been better as a straight documentary rather than this fractured blend of the real and the staged, an approach that keeps us at an emotional distance.
As
Guantánamo
delves deeper into American malfeasance at the detention facility, the actual people who have been abused become mere abstractions. We begin to identify more with the actors in the dramatized re-enactments than with the real people who experienced the abuse firsthand.
Despite its problems,
Guantánamo
functions as a wake-up call, reminding us of how we have lost sight of principles like justice and freedom and begun to see them as ours alone to define and employ.
Guantánamo
will inspire navel-gazing in more thoughtful Americans, who may begin to ask the fundamental question of just what we, as Americans, now represent to the world.
