Is there any image in the post 9/11 conspiracy drama genre more ubiquitous than heavily redacted legal files? Those black lines struck through word after word like blocks of thunder smothering all sense of intelligent life. They represent the hopeless struggle of men and women stolen from the world and suspended in a bureaucratic limbo that Kafka himself would find hard pressed to imagine. In Kevin Macdonald’s adaptation of
Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Salahi,
The Mauritanian, we are confronted with 20,000 boxes worth.
Salahi was detained in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years, the victim of extraordinary rendition after the 9/11 attacks and then “special measures” ordered by Donald Rumsfeld in order to stop a second 9/11. He was subjected to 70 days of torture by military intelligence which included stress positions, visual protocols, waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and even a fake execution.
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Starring
Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, Shailene Woodley
Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tahar Rahim convincingly inhabit their roles in this compelling post-9/11 legal drama, based on Mohamedou Ould Salahi s best-selling real life account,
Guantanamo Diary, and mostly played out in the infamous Cuban-US enclave.
In a sense, it s an older more weathered Clarice Starling from
Silence of the Lambs we meet in
The Mauritanian. Foster is thirty-one years older, but, along with a few (pale) laughter lines, we are still getting the thin, pursed lips, the same blue-eyed steely determination wringing every drop out of the moment. The same tersely-enunciated pronouncements on what is right and wrong, the stern unflinching ability to sift through the lies people tell, will prove familiar.
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