‘Guantanamo’ doesn’t dig enough
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 6, 2006
The story of the “Tipton Three” is better known in Britain than in the U.S., although that might change with the release of “The Road to Guantanamo,” an angry new docudrama from the prolific English director Michael Winterbottom.
The Tipton Three are a trio of British Muslims who were held at the Guantanamo prison for two years and then released without being charged. Their names are Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhel Ahmed.
The movie tells their story via an experimental device: We see the real men, speaking into the camera, and we also watch re-enacted scenes of their misadventure (not re-enacted by them, but by mostly nonprofessional actors).
According to the men, they traveled from England to Pakistan in September 2001 for the wedding of one of them. A fourth friend went along, but he vanished in the chaos that followed.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the men got the idea to travel to Afghanistan to aid in the relief efforts – or maybe just to see a war first-hand. Whatever their reason, they were rounded up in a group of suspected Taliban or possibly Al-Qaeda operatives. Eventually, they were imprisoned at the United States camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The stories of coercion and abuse that follow are strictly their version of events, of course; this film doesn’t pretend to be an investigative report. And that may be why, as shocking and disturbing as the material is, it presents a naggingly difficult dilemma for the viewer.
If what the Tipton Three say is true, then their story is horrifying. Winterbottom and co-director Mat Whitecross appear to accept their tale at face value, but it would be useful to have some kind of journalistic backbone to this movie. For instance, the Afghanistan episode is vague – what on earth were these guys thinking, road-tripping into a war zone?
I couldn’t help thinking that a straight investigative documentary on the subject is truly what’s needed. After all, some of the strongest moments in “Road to Guantanamo” are actual news clips surrounding the situation, like the startling clip of Donald Rumsfeld saying that methods used at Guantanamo are “consistent with the Geneva Convention, for the most part.”
Winterbottom’s style is effective, a you-are-there approach he honed in the Middle Eastern immigrant saga “In This World.” That struck me as a much better movie, however. This may well be an important film in its way, but it raises more issues than it knows how to deal with.
