The Road to Guantanamo

The prolific Michael Winterbottom cements his claim as director of the year, by offering this important semi-documentary just months after releasing the delightfully convoluted Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. This film includes its own fearless (or heedless) convolutions. Without advance preparation, it takes the viewer a while to figure out that we are alternating after-the-fact talking-head interviews of three Muslim young men, with rough-and-ready footage of their version of events being enacted by four others, who don’t clearly match up, and then actual news footage of events in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. We take at face value -- literally -- the claim that the British Muslim boys were in effect on a pre-nuptial lark when they crossed over from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then got sucked into events, which eventually landed them in Guantanamo. Frankly this film is preaching to the choir, when it shows how dehumanizing treatment debases captive and captor alike. It does not reenact Abu Ghraib-like abuses, but shows how the norm of treatment, once the Geneva conventions are thrown away, is both brutalizing and unproductive. When the Tipton Three were released from Guantanamo after two years of incarceration, they were held for less than a day by British police, since the alibi for why it couldn’t have been them, consorting with Mohammed Atta as alleged, was confirmed by their former probation officers. Painful viewing, but a must-see -- not the whole story, but a realistic perspective. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-64.)