Beyond the Multiplex

The docudrama "The Road to Guantánamo," about three British Muslims held at Gitmo, will horrify you, upset you -- and drive you mad.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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"The Road to Guantánamo"

June 22, 2006 | Reality may be an ambiguous quality to philosophers, but it's still the hottest thing going in independent film. Every time I think the craze for documentaries has run its course, we get another. Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth" -- that's the Al Gore/global-warming movie, if you've been sailing the Antarctic Ocean for two months -- is clearly one of the event pictures of the summer, along with Robert Altman's "Prairie Home Companion" (and isn't that, in some bizarre way, a metafictional document of the "real" world too?).

Patrick Creadon's "Wordplay" had a massive opening in New York last weekend. Now, you could argue that a doc about the New York Times crossword puzzle and the "solving community" around it (that's really the phrase!) isn't exactly going to be huge in the hinterlands. But people, you and I know that the hinterlands ain't what they used to be. Folks out there drive those Volvo wagons with the magic little kiddie seats in the way-back, and they've grown accustomed to the fact that the supermarket over at Hinterland Creek Town Centre carries decent Pinot Noir, organic Meyer lemons and at least three kinds of Havarti (plain, with caraway seeds, and with those irritating little bits of dill). You bet your ass they know who Will Shortz is. (This is important: 50 Down for Wednesday is "Utah." "Ariz" throws the whole thing out of whack.)

Reality comes with a sharp and jagged knife-edge this week. It's impossible to say whether the nationwide audiences who have flocked to see "An Inconvenient Truth" will respond to Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' blood-curdling docudrama "The Road to Guantánamo." But this story of three British Muslims who were captured in Afghanistan and held as suspected terrorists for more than two years at Gitmo makes Big Al's doomsday scenarios look like a Shirley Temple production number, and may divide viewers on political lines even more sharply than Guggenheim's film does.

Since "The Road to Guantánamo" strikes me as the most important and most challenging film we're likely to see in the United States this year, I don't have much space to pay serious attention to anything else. But let's cast a surprised and grateful glance at aging cinematic bad boy Larry Clark ("Kids," "Bully," etc.), whose new film "Wassup Rockers" opens in New York this week, and also spare a thought for another veteran, Japanese director Yoji Yamada, whose sensitive and moving samurai drama "The Hidden Blade" should appear briefly in big-city theaters before its DVD release.

"Road to Guantánamo": Three Stooges from the Midlands go to "1984"
I don't know if it's possible for American viewers to have an appropriate reaction to "The Road to Guantánamo." I can only tell you that when I saw it, at a daytime screening during the Tribeca Film Festival, I walked out into the spring sunshine and felt profoundly confused. I was horrified, angry and upset, which are all more or less predictable reactions to the subject matter. But in all honesty, reaction No. 1 was: This can't really be happening. After that came the thought that, yeah, lots of other Americans would feel the same way: This can't be true. This isn't real. Something's wrong with this picture.

At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions. It combines documentary elements -- interviews with the three young British Muslims known as the "Tipton Three," from their hometown outside Birmingham -- with a harrowing fictional re-creation of what they say happened to them after they were taken prisoner in Afghanistan. It offers the most scathing possible critique of American (and British) tactics in the so-called war on terror, but only by way of a story whose details cannot be verified. (I'll be interviewing Winterbottom soon for Salon's Conversations series.)

"The Road to Guantánamo" challenges American viewers to confront the possibility (note that word, please) that the worst fantasies of the Chomskyite left fringe have already come to pass. In other words, the possibility that the country some of us still believe is capable of fulfilling the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt has already become a new kind of totalitarian superstate, enforcing consumer narcosis at home with a borderless secret-police apparatus that spans the globe. At the same time, the film cannot dispel other hypotheses: Maybe the Tipton Three are a complete anomaly, and everybody else sent to Gitmo is a hardened al-Qaida assassin. Maybe the Tipton Three are not the hapless bozos they appear to be, but decided to prey on the sympathies of weak-minded liberal journalists after their release.

We're going to hear all these theories, and more besides, as this film percolates into the American consciousness. My point, ladies and gentlemen, if I have one, is this: "The Road to Guantánamo" will drive you crazy, if you aren't crazy yet. It documents a period of acute insanity, and all possible responses to it will sound paranoid to someone. (I have the feeling that I should end every sentence of this review with three exclamation marks: You just are totally not going to believe this!!! This is so way fucked-up!!!) Treat it as the gospel truth, treat it as terrorist-loving lefty hogwash, treat it as some unstable narrative middle ground between truth and fiction. Essentially all these routes have the same destination: We have gone through the rabbit hole. We've swallowed the red pill. Yo, Toto -- we left Kansas behind a long time ago, dude.

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