Part documentary, part dramatic recreation, The Road to Guantanamo offers forth a
prima facie account of three British citizens who were held for more than two
years without charges in the eponymous American military prison in
an opaque facility whose continued operation represents an ongoing payoff in
propaganda for would-be international jihadists.
Michael Winterbottom, is a filmmaker known
— to the degree that he is, outside the hardcore arthouse set — largely for his
intersecting interests in war, class, sociopolitical activism and their
respective influences upon the human condition. His movies, too, often come
wrapped up in collagist, avant-garde storytelling. From both the similarly
minded Welcome to Sarajevo and In This World to last year’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
and 9 Songs, though, Winterbottom
remains a filmmaker in many ways more appealing in principle than in actuality
— an intellectual of wide and varied preoccupations who has a propensity for
getting lost in too much navel-gazing. Very interesting but in some ways also
frustrating, The Road to Guantanamo
continues that trend.
Intercutting dramatizations with neophyte actors and
interviews with the real-life figures they depict — Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed and
Shafiq Rasul, who range from 19 to 23 years of age at the time of the events —
the film chronicles the events that follow from the group setting out from the
British Midlands town of
Asif’s arranged marriage in
After the wedding is postponed, the trio and another friend, Monir Ali, cross
over the
border just as the
bombing campaign of that country intensifies. From there their dark,
surrealistic misadventure only worsens, and they are eventually captured by
Northern Alliance forces, transferred to American custody and taken to Camp
X-Ray and, later, the more permanent Camp Delta, in Guantanamo.
Cast against the rhetoric of absolutes that President Bush
and, to a lesser if more articulate degree, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
have fed their respective publics about the enduring war on terror and the
identities of those radical, dangerous “dead-enders” held in Guantanamo, the
movie is undeniably illuminating. The so-called “Tipton Three” (Monir gets lost
and is never heard from again), while not angels (each was at some point on
probation for petty offenses back in
are hardly Al Qaeda terrorists or even flaming ideologues. They’re rendered in
full, three-dimensional form, and their caged humiliation and torture (at the
hands, variously, of Americans, Brits and, most brutally, Northern Alliance
Afghanis) delivers a calculable impact.
Still, The Road to
Guantanamo, from its too haphazardly quilted opening through the first 35
minutes or so, plays too coy with the group’s motivations, never adequately
assessing why these somewhat secularized loafers would go willfully into a war
zone on a good Samaritan’s lark. The admission of a more mercenary or at least
foolhardy call to arms wouldn’t necessarily completely dint the impact of the
subsequent moral questions under the microscope, but Winterbottom and
co-director Mat Whitecross seem to tacitly acknowledge the complications this
presents by skirting the issue entirely. The result, though, is a movie that
seems to be deficient in due diligence. Lacking both a sermon-to-the-choir
fervor or a libertarian persuasiveness, The
Road to Guantanamo instead lies flat.
Additionally, it’s problematic to cut back and forth between
characters and real-life figures who look little alike, and this tack robs the
movie of a sense of distinct rootedness. Instead, despite the fantastical and
inherently stirring true story on display, we’re left for the most part with only an
impressionist’s sense of swirling grey morality. (Roadside Attractions/Film
Four, R, 94 mins.)