In the cinema: Kevin Macdonald’s judicial drama “The Mauritanian – (Not) a Question of Justice” with Jodie Foster.
Of the 779 prisoners in Guantanamo, eight were convicted of a crime. Three of these judgments have since been overturned on appeal. This brief information, with which Kevin Macdonald’s film “The Mauritanian” ends, says a lot about the injustice associated with the name of the prison camp.
A feature film can put it in far clearer images. If one were to illustrate what happened to the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was innocently imprisoned for 14 years, with all means available to Hollywood, the result would be difficult to bear. A few abstract scenes in this film stand for the incessant terror.
All torture methods approved by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation or other physical harm, were used by Salahi’s tormentors to force false confessions. They could not be used in court and did not preclude his belated acquittal in 2016. The fact that this verdict even came about – the murder charge for the attacks on September 11, 2001 alleged a connection to the Hamburg cell – throws a friendly light on the American legal system, at least in the end. But Guantanamo is still in operation today. What can courts achieve against injustice committed in Cuba, outside of American territory?
The British Macdonald has dealt with crimes against humanity several times in his work: In the documentary “One Day in September” with the assassination attempt on Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games in 1972; in “My Enemy’s Enemy” with the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie or – in “The Last King of Scotland” – with the dictatorship of Idi Amins. For his film, originally announced as the “Guantanamo Diary” after Salahi’s published memoirs, he chose a cinematic form that had been tried and tested hundreds of times, the court drama.
The genre works like a machine here, supported by an excellent cast. She is led by Jodie Foster in the role of defense attorney Nancy Hollander. Your name is still in front of that of the actual main actor, Tahar Rahim, on the poster. That says a lot about the weighting of the characters. When a prisoner’s diary written from an almost hopeless perspective turns into a court drama with a known positive outcome, despair turns into forgiveness – and the US legal system comes off better than the Guantanamo issue suggests. Discussions about the constitution, which, as Foster’s film character once explains, comes along without an asterisk to refer to attached exemptions, seem almost cheap.
It is astonishing that the film, which we classify as “12 years and older”, can only be seen in the USA for people 17 and older. Apparently young people there are more likely to deal with depictions of violence than with debates about human rights. Or maybe about the racist structures that made it possible in the “war on terror” to arrest people who maybe only made their skin color and religion appear suspicious.
In doing so, the film with the victim it portrays enters relatively safe territory. The young man, who is kidnapped from a wedding on a Mauritanian beach after having previously studied in Germany, also allows western viewers to identify with it. Although doubts about his innocence are nourished dramatically at first, it soon becomes clear that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And his only misdemeanor was to have taken a call from a relative on his cell phone, who in turn apparently used a bin Laden’s phone. Who can defend themselves when there is no charge?
Anyone who makes a film against the death penalty (which is also a topic here) can take it easy and make an innocent person the protagonist. If, on the other hand, the uncompromising attitude is important to you, the argument will be based on the example of a person who is really guilty. As important as it is to show a film about Guantanamo at the time of a new democratic awakening in the USA – Macdonald shies away from the disturbance appropriate to the topic.
Far from any cliché, Tahar Rahim alone acts as Salahi: this figure is never in danger of being marginalized as a mere victim. Around him, on the other hand, there is only all too familiar: Jodie Foster delivers exactly the portrayal of a self-confident lawyer of cool strategic genius that Hollywood provides here – even if she explains in interviews that her real role model is a more warm-hearted appearance. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the military attorney as an expected opponent. When even this conservative mind casts doubts about the legality of detaining people without charge, the case seems almost won.
But that is exactly the problem: in reality nothing is won, and as long as even a country like Great Britain detains a Julian Assange, trust in the rule of law of Western democracies remains damaged.
The Mauritanian. USA / UK 2021. Director: Kevin Macdonald. 130 min.
