To Hell and Back

Just in time for its U.S. release, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ fierce docudrama The Road to Guantanamo received a giant shot of free publicity in early June with the news that three Arab inmates—none of whom had officially been charged with any crimes—hanged themselves at the infamous Cuban detention center, in the unbearably hot outdoor cages where they’d been kept for upwards of four years. A high-ranking U.S. official offered the charming hypothesis that the men’s deaths were a calculated exercise in PR. Guantanamo begs to differ. An unblushingly partisan blend of documentary with dramatic action—much of which is usefully devoted to rubbing our faces in the excesses inflicted on camp inmates by American soldiers and interrogators—the movie shoves us roughly into the shoes of four young British Muslims, known in England as the Tipton Three after their Midlands hometown. (The fourth disappeared in Afghanistan and has never been heard from since.) En route to a wedding in Pakistan in September 2001, the group fell into the bloodstained hands of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance before being shipped off by the American military to Guantanamo. There, they spent two grueling years before being released without charges or apology. The three principals, Ruhel, Asif and Shafiq—chubby-cheeked, earnest and very much jazzed by the opportunity to shape their ordeal into a narrative—face the camera to tell their story, which a cast of non-pro actors refashions into a graphic thriller propelled by a pounding score. Peppered with television news footage and bellicose fighting talk from assorted Bushies and Brits, the film’s early scenes rush us with larky abandon through a vacation from hell in Karachi as the boys’ tender Western stomachs fall prey to diarrhea. As they visit a local mosque and get sidetracked to Kandahar by an imam’s call for humanitarian aid, the mood darkens. The movie works itself into a frenzy of smoke, gunfire and random bombing, lit in livid ochres. We see the boys survive an attack, then rot in an overcrowded jail in Kunduz—until at last they arrive at Guantanamo. Shackled and orange-suited, with huge black goggles or the notorious bags over their head, they face torture, trickery and relentless interrogation, infrequently interrupted by small acts of kindness from the grunts who guard their outdoor cages. Though famously adventurous with form, Winterbottom has been here before with his terrific In This World (2003), in which he used amateur regional actors to create a fictional document of two Afghan asylum-seekers’ overland journey. Remixing that technique, Guantanamo codes a true story as an action picture and, for better and worse, comes up with a far more excitable, impressionistic movie, at once more galvanizing and murkier with the facts. There’s little reason to doubt Winterbottom’s lurid account of what went on in the camp: the flagrant indifference to Geneva Convention protocol and the routine crossing of the line between interrogation and torture are torn from the headlines with visceral ferocity. And on the evidence of the recent suicides, they still go on, despite Bush’s belated announcement that he wants the place closed. Still, for a movie that relies heavily on reenactments to have no credited screenwriter seems like a deliberate fudging of the line between reality and fiction. By inviting us to trust the Tipton Three’s accounts of what they were doing in Afghanistan, Guantanamo falls into a familiar trap of agitprop filmmaking—turning the victim into a hero. The movie gives us no particular reason to believe that they were up to anything nefarious, or that they weren’t; Winterbottom has called them “ordinary kids.” Hardly. Two were on parole back home before they left for Karachi. Rumsfeld and associates have lied energetically about Guantanamo from push to shove. But it doesn’t follow that the Tipton Three are reliable narrators, even at the relatively trivial level of bragging about their defiance in the face of their captors. Back home Ruhel, Asif and Shafiq seem slightly at a loss to sum up how the trauma has changed their lives, except to say that it strengthened their religious beliefs. One thing is clear, though. If their captivity strengthens them to the point where they join Islam’s fundamentalist wing, Guantanamo will not have been a deterrent to terror, but an accessory.