Beyond the Multiplex

A movie about the Bush-Cheney policy of torture that will make you shake with rage. Plus: Alec Baldwin's unintended laugh lines.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Film Festivals, Movies, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Movie Reviews, Bush, Alec Baldwin, Arts & Entertainment, Documentaries, Independent Film, Reviews, Torture, Beyond the Multiplex, Abu Ghraib, Tribeca Film Festival

"Taxi to the Dark Side"

April 30, 2007 | NEW YORK -- We'll get to the really important news from the Tribeca Film Festival shortly (i.e., Baldwin, Alec; inadvertently humorous dialogue spoken by). But first some lighter fare: Exactly how and when did the United States of America become a police state?

Even Alex Gibney's elegant and terrifying documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" can't exactly answer that question. But it sure gives some clues. After the explosive Saturday night premiere of this film, which offers a thoroughly researched history lesson on the recent development of torture as U.S. policy, from the Afghanistan invasion through Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, I stumbled out into a mild spring night on West 23rd Street feeling as if I needed to vomit. When an audience member asked Gibney, during the post-screening Q&A, about his hopes for the film, the director replied, "I hope it provokes some rage." Well, it worked on me.

In the long haul, you hope that this movie's account of how the Bush-Cheney administration has eviscerated the Constitution, and abandoned basic tenets of human rights and human dignity, provokes some constructive rage. But right there on the sidewalk, my rage was not constructive. I wanted to get stinking drunk in some dead-end bar (not the actual ones available on 23rd Street, where the drinks come in funny colors and cost $14) and scream at strangers, tell them that if this country had any fucking stones we would drag these people out of Washington, strip them of their citizenship and their clothes, and drive them white-baby naked across the Rio Grande to fend for themselves in the Sonora desert.

It's not that there's any truly startling new information in "Taxi to the Dark Side." Gibney makes clear how much of his film rests on the reporting of Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden of the New York Times, among various others. If you've been reading the best investigative reporting on the subject since the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke, in fact, you've gotten the main points already: The abuse and beatings and torture and murder (yes, murder) of detainees in U.S. custody have not been the result of a few undisciplined "bad apples" in the military. Rather, they have resulted from a deliberately murky policy set at the Defense Department and in the White House, whose true goals are to claim far-reaching, extra-constitutional powers for the president; to establish that Muslim detainees from other countries have no inherent human rights or legal rights at all; and to condition the American people to the belief that torture will stop terrorism, and that to think otherwise is to be a pantywaist Osama lover.

As he did in his influential "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Gibney illustrates the news in compelling human detail, and broadens and deepens both the reporting and the argumentation. He coaxes several former Abu Ghraib interrogators and military police to speak on camera, and there are photographs and grainy video images -- some of them pretty hard to take -- that haven't been seen by the public before. Among his interviewees are many of the star figures in this sordid drama: British-born detainee Moazzam Begg, who spent almost three years in U.S. custody; Damien Corsetti, a hulking former Army intelligence specialist who served both at Abu Ghraib and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan; and Alberto Mora, former general counsel to the Navy and the Bush administration's leading legal whistle-blower on these issues.

Furthermore, Gibney makes movies. It would be discordant on various levels to call "Taxi to the Dark Side" an entertainment, but it's certainly an artful construction of many different visual and sonic elements, which moves from a personal, intimate focus to a more global and historical view and then back again. His title itself connects two people widely separated by power and geography, but linked by history. The first is an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, a peasant from a penniless and illiterate rural family who was killed by U.S. soldiers after being detained at Bagram in December 2002. His death was the first certified homicide of a detainee in U.S. custody, or at least the first to get anybody's attention. (There have been at least 36 more since then, Gibney says, not including controversial, ambiguous or unresolved cases.)

Gibney suggests that Dilawar's death, and all the "harsh treatment" -- still profoundly upsetting, when you see it all again -- that followed at Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and other places whose names we don't know, grew out of Dick Cheney's famous pronouncement shortly after 9/11 that in order to fight the war against terrorism, "we have to work the dark side." Some might argue that Cheney has never worked on any other side, but the ramifications of his argument go beyond personal evil.

Next page: Surreal dialogue from the mouth of Alec Baldwin