The Mauritanian

 

Documentarian Kevin McDonald has directed a handful of feature films. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar and Golden Globe for portraying Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in McDonald's The Last King of Scotland (2006). Jodie Foster just won a Globe for playing attorney Nancy Hollander in The Mauritanian, McDonald's adaptation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir Guantanamo Diary, which recounts his torture while a detainee suspected of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks and Hollander's efforts with assistant Teri Duncan (Shaileen Woodley) to uncover the truth and secure Slahi's release.

While Foster is steely and efficient as a woman guided more by protection than affection, French actor Tahar Rahim pours so much heart and anguish into his portrayal of Slahi that the film seems almost pointless when he's not on-screen.

Some of that is also due to the wispiness of the legal aspects here. What is known now about extradition and torture was not known when Slahi was captured in 2002, and needed to be discovered, revealed by the players. The circumstances surrounding Slahi's capture and detention, the nature of the evidence gathered about him, the testimony of others supposedly involved in the attacks, the motives of his interrogators are touched on but mainly left to inference, which feels to me as if they are beside the point. I think doing so misses the point of Slahi's memoir.

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that major motion pictures released in theaters are at a disadvantage to streaming services that can devote 5x the number of minutes to developing the complexities of these narratives. For all of its winning qualities -- Foster, Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Pentagon's lead prosecutor -- the film has the feel of a warm embrace of Slahi and those others wrongfully treated by the United States and not an exposition of how the country got it so wrong.