Abu Jandal plays a real-life cabby, just as complicated as Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver.
By Felicia Feaster
The Oath
features a story so strange it feels more like fiction than fact. In Guantánamo, a mild-mannered, peaceable man, Salim Hamdan, languished for seven years after he was rounded up as a terrorist for being Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur in the 1990s. But his brother-in-law Abu Jandal managed to escape the Americans, despite his job as bin Laden’s bodyguard and his passionate Jihad advocacy. In one chilling moment in present-day Yemen, where he works as a taxi driver, the “reformed” warrior Jandal quizzes his tiny son Habib on who put Hamdan in jail. “America!” the little boy recites by rote. Few news programs or investigations of 9.11 and its aftermath have plumbed terrorism with this kind of insight. It is an eerie moment in Laura Poitras’ all-too-real documentary about the depths of anti-American anger and religious fervor that exist in the Middle East.
The director of the 2007 Oscar-nominated Iraq doc
My Country, My Country
—a disturbing glimpse, as seen through the eyes of a Sunni doctor, into how the Iraq war has ravaged the country—Poitras hones in on the microcosmic story within the macrocosmic one to record the human vantage behind war. As such, there are no grand revelations in The Oath. Drama is derived, instead, from the film’s fly-on-the-wall peek into the culture of al-Qaeda, as when Jandal instructs young Yemeni men on the necessity of holy war.
When Poitras’ camera moves into the streets of Yemen to take in the countless crow-like women entirely draped in black burkas, one realizes just how radical is a Western woman recording this secret world of men. Her access is nothing short of astounding.
The Oath may be too exposition-steeped for some viewers, as it’s bogged down in back-and-forth commentary on Hamdan’s legal case and in Jandal’s mind-boggling changes of allegiance. Hamdan is never interviewed on camera but, instead, is represented in photos, a video of his capture and the letters he wrote home to his family. One minute Jandal espouses holy war and the next he expresses regret over the loss of life on 9.11. He decries America to his son and then praises the West for its capitalist triumphs, including superior ginger ale. As he cagily looks into his rearview mirror, Jandal seems as haunted and as contradictory—one moment, pacifist; the next, warrior—as that other cabby, Travis Bickle, in Taxi Driver.
The Oath was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and took home the cinematography award. It’s no wonder: Despite the ideological ugliness (of both Guantánamo and al-Qaeda) of what Poitras documents, the film is often incomparably beautiful. The way her camera glides through the ancient streets of Yemen or takes in the stormy clouds and desolate roads of Guantánamo only magnifies the impact of the film. She aestheticizes and makes important those places about which we might rather not think too much.
The Oath
Directed by Laura Poitras
With Salim Hamdan and
Abu Jandal
The Screen
90 min.
NR
