The Mauritanian
Kevin Macdonald (2021)
Kevin Macdonald’s film, among the offerings in this year’s Glasgow Film Festival programme, is based on Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Salahi’s memoir of captivity in Guantánamo Bay, where he was held for fourteen years. Salahi, who had been a member of al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, was suspected of continuing association with the group. In November 2001, he volunteered for questioning in his native Mauritania in connection with the so-called Millennium Plot. After interrogation by Mauritanian officers and FBI agents, he was held for eight months in a Jordanian prison under the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme then transferred to military custody and Guantánamo Bay in August 2002. Salahi was accused of recruiting a number of the 9/11 terrorists but never charged or tried throughout his long detention in ‘Gitmo’, where he was tortured repeatedly.
It’s no surprise that The Mauritanian majors on the latter or that Macdonald favours a handheld camera and rapid-fire editing for the torture sequences, both to intensify their immediacy and to obscure some of the most gruesome details. No surprise either that Salahi (Tahar Rahim) has a high-profile, notoriously anti-establishment defence lawyer, Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster), or that her potential adversary, the military prosecutor Stuart Crouch (Benedict Cumberbatch), is (a) personally invested in the case, having lost a personal friend in 9/11, and (b) eventually compelled by conscience to refuse to prosecute. All these things may be historically accurate but they’re also familiar elements in War on Terror and/or legal drama. You almost get a sense from The Mauritanian that the movie was green-lit because key features of Salahi’s experience fitted required dramatic convention. Macdonald’s film announces itself as ‘a true story’ but is so generic that it seldom feels like one.
The Mauritanian is original only when it turns improbable. For example, maybe Nancy Hollander and her junior colleague Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) did fall out and temporarily part company before reconciling and rejoining forces shortly before the hearing of Salahi’s habeas corpus petition in 2009. It’s incredible, however, that the rift between them occurred as the film describes. They apply successfully to see a large amount of classified material relating to Salahi’s case, including confessions that he made. Reading these, a shocked Teri exclaims that their client must be guilty after all. Well, if it really didn’t occur to Duncan that the confessions might have been coerced then Hollander did well to dispense with her services. There are three names on the unimpressive screenplay, the first of them a pseudonym – and a pretentious one at that. M B Traven sounds to be the natural successor to the mysterious B Traven whose novels included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The latter’s actual identity is still debated today but IMDb knows that M B Traven is Michael Bonner. His more honest co-writers are Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani.
It’s refreshing to see a dynamic lead performance from Tahar Rahim, especially so soon after watching him on television in The Serpent, where his wig and make-up seemed to drain Rahim of energy. And it’s nice to see Jodie Foster again, following what feels like a long absence (since Carnage (2011) she’s appeared in only two cinema features, neither of which I’ve seen). Her Nancy Hollander has a lean-and-hungry magnetism, despite the fact that Foster isn’t given much to do besides look alert and increasingly troubled as she reads case material and Salahi’s own prison writings (which trigger the flashbacks to his torture). Shailene Woodley is wasted in her weakly written part. Benedict Cumberbatch is so on top of his character that he seems to be overacting – ditto Denis Ménochet as the man who first draws Hollander’s attention to Salahi’s case. It’s counterproductive to cast someone as high-powered as Ménochet in such a purely functional role. The people in bit parts generally do more acting than is good for The Mauritanian: neutrally played, they might at least have given the film a bit of documentary veneer.
That said, the film does finally strike home as ‘a true story’, though not through its dramatised action. Just as Salahi starts to celebrate the news that a judge has granted the writ of habeas corpus and ordered his release, the screen goes black. Macdonald puts up text explaining that the Obama administration appealed the judge’s decision. The upshot was that Salahi was detained in Guantánamo for a further six years before being eventually released and returned to Mauritania in October 2016. More text follows – a note of the hundreds of Gitmo prisoners detained and eventually released without charge or trial (compared with the handful of prosecutions pursued). The statistics thoroughly eclipse the preceding two hours of screen time. Macdonald then shows film of the real Mohamedou Ould Salahi throughout the closing credits. By the time they’re over, the image of Tahar Rahim’s Salahi, and the actor’s strong performance, have been well and truly obscured. Kevin Macdonald has a substantial track record in non-fiction film-making (One Day in September, My Enemy’s Enemy, Marley, Whitney). Perhaps The Mauritanian should have been a documentary too.
28 February 2021