The road to Guantanamo

Guantanamo
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

I've been trying to come up with a meaningful post about this all afternoon.

If you were to click on the Movies page at the NY Times' website today, you'd see a jarring juxtaposition of images that perfectly capture the September 11 2001 before-and-after trajectory: from brave and wounded victim to rendition, torture, and debasement. The Tribeca Film Festival opened with United 93, but will also be showing another film showing the brutal aftermath of that flight, The Road to Guantanamo.

While political fiction is often used to disguise real-life identities, one of the festival's strongest works is an amazing hybrid. Michael Winterbottom combines fact and fiction in "The Road to Guantánamo" (opening commercially on June 23), recounting the story of the Muslim men from Britain now known as the Tipton Three. In 2001 they set off for a wedding in Pakistan, took a side trip to Afghanistan and were captured by the Northern Alliance, held at an American military camp and later shipped to Guantánamo. They remained imprisoned there for two years, until evidence emerged that they were still in Britain at the time they were accused of having been at a rally with Osama bin Laden.

The real Tipton Three tell their stories in interviews throughout the film. (Most of those segments were handled by its co-director, Mat Whitecross.) But the work's strengths come from juxtaposing those segments with dramatic episodes in which actors play out the men's confusion and captivity in brutal detail.

Mr. Winterbottom (the master director of works like "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "Tristram Shandy") places viewers in a world where one man at Guantánamo is kept outdoors in a chain-link cage, and another is shackled in a painful posture in a dark room and bombarded with loud noise. The film doesn't question the men's version of events, but it creates a believable story with staggering force.

Because "The Road to Guantánamo" is in English, it may not seem foreign at all, but Mr. Winterbottom's British perspective is quite precise. Early on, the film shows a clip from a joint news conference that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair held in 2003.

Mr. Bush says of Guantánamo prisoners: "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people, and we look forward to working closely with the Blair government to deal with the issue." The American military may be the film's great villain, but Mr. Winterbottom makes it clear that the Blair government is complicit.

Not having seen the film, I can't confirm that the American military is the picture's villain, but in reality, it's the Dept. of Justice that's the villain, together with the civilian masters of the Pentagon. As a nation we, understandably, lashed out in response to the attacks. But after lashing out (somewhat weakly as it turned out, as Rumsfeld's vision of dashing special ops guys on horseback working side by side with the Northern Alliance wasn't quite enough to nab al Qaeda's leadership), many of us wanted to stop and take a deep breadth and figure out what to do next. DoJ and the Pentagon codified the lashing out and looked for more meat to grind. Guantanamo, Iraq, Abu Ghraib were the sick, soul destroying results.

Anyway, the howling you'll hear when The Road to Guantanamo is released nationally is the sound of the ever aggrieved wingnutosphere, whose chronic cognitive dissonance has lately been forcing them to hold their heads funny, as if they have soapy water in the ear.

As for United 93, I guess I agree with Manohla Dargis' review -- it's not that it's "too soon," or that a cinematic memorial to the bravery of the people on the flight isn't deserved. But I do wonder what a slick, cross-cutting suspense flick, from the maker of The Bourne Supremacy, adds to our understanding of the event or the people at its center.

I suppose I'll go see it. Maybe it's important to see them both. One, as a (needless) reminder; the other, as a corrective.