The Road to Guantánamo.

For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, The Road to Guantánamo is "the most important and most challenging film we're likely to see in the United States this year." What's more...

[The film] challenges American viewers to confront the possibility (note that word, please) that the worst fantasies of the Chomskyite left fringe have already come to pass. In other words, the possibility that the country some of us still believe is capable of fulfilling the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt has already become a new kind of totalitarian superstate, enforcing consumer narcosis at home with a borderless secret-police apparatus that spans the globe. At the same time, the film cannot dispel other hypotheses: Maybe the Tipton Three are a complete anomaly, and everybody else sent to Gitmo is a hardened al-Qaida assassin. Maybe the Tipton Three are not the hapless bozos they appear to be, but decided to prey on the sympathies of weak-minded liberal journalists after their release.

We're going to hear all these theories, and more besides, as this film percolates into the American consciousness.

Updated through 6/24.

Anthony Kaufman for Alternet: "A couple years back, director [Michael] Winterbottom crafted a similarly stunning docudrama called In This World, a woefully under-seen immigration tale that followed two real-life Afghan refugees on a harrowing journey from Peshawar to Britain.... Never sensational, Road to Guantánamo isn't agit-prop, but it does strike a powerful blow at the heart of the Bush administration's callous wartime policies, revealing the suffering it has inflicted on innocent people."

"There's little reason to doubt Winterbottom's lurid account of what went on in the camp (the flagrant indifference to Geneva Convention protocol, the routine crossing of the line between interrogation and torture are torn from the headlines with visceral ferocity) and - on the evidence of last week's suicides, clearly still does - despite Bush's belated announcement that he wants the place closed," writes Ella Taylor. "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, a popular gambit these days but nonetheless specious for all that. By inviting us to take on trust the Tipton Three's accounts of what they were doing in Afghanistan, Guantánamo falls into a familiar trap of agitprop filmmaking - turning the victim into a hero."

Also in the LA Weekly, Winterbottom tells Scott Foundas, "One of the terrible things about Guantánamo is that before it existed, no one would have believed it could exist, and once it closes down, people will be horrified that it ever existed.... Something like Guantánamo sends out a very strong signal to the rest of the world that the rule of law does not apply when America doesn't want it to apply."

"For a film loaded with war casualties and torture, it's disarmingly entertaining," writes Stephen Beachy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He hits his main point, though, at the end:

Even in other recent films that package their torture as political critique, like Syriana and V for Vendetta, the subjects and objects of the verb 'to torture' have been muddled; we've watched only white Americans and Brits enduring the worst, at the hands of Muslims, cartoon characters, or - in movies like Hostel, in which the torture is pure entertainment - East European whores and Germanic S-M fags. As in dreams, audiences probably understand that the roles are confused, and that Americans should actually be the ones wielding the clubs and attack dogs. Finally, however, we've been presented with a more accurate grammar: The Americans and British are torturing and the Muslims are tortured. For that reason alone, The Road to Guantánamo is an important and necessary film.

J Hoberman in the Voice: "By making a spectacle of the purposeless violence inflicted by frightened authority on whoever might be available, the movie could just as well have been called The Road to Haditha."

For the AV Club's Scott Tobias, "What it lacks is a necessary dash of skepticism."

"[F]lawed but inflammatory," offer Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, arguing that "the contradictory approaches [of dramatization and documentary] undermine each other." Keough also talks with co-director Mat Whitecross, who counter-argues that "the only way to make a documentary in a traditionally understood form is to be with them as everything was happening, and obviously that’s impossible. So the only way you could do it is with 'talking heads.' And it's just not a very cinematic way of describing it to an audience." Also: The Tipton Three today.

Updates: Nick Pinkerton opens Reverse Shot's round at indieWIRE by arguing that Road is "a not-too-distant cousin of Paul Greengrass's recent United 93. Both represent the same tendency towards visceral, present-tense cinematic reportage that, through the integration of actuality footage and that universal symbol for facile cinematic 'immediacy,' handheld camerawork, the film seeks to immerse the viewer firsthand in the queasy ordeal of experiencing headline-sized tragedy." Kristi Mitsuda is swept up, but Lauren Kaminsky has her reservations.

As for Armond White's review, Matt Cornell has already commented sufficiently. In this same issue of the New York Press, reviewing Nacho Libre, he calls the benign comedy School of Rock "hateful." White used to be outrageous and thought-provoking; recently, he's just been outrageous.

Though the film "does not tell us anything new," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, "It is nonetheless a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference, a graphic tour of a place many citizens of Western democracies would prefer not to think about.... But by far the scariest thing about this movie is that, for too many people in this country and elsewhere, it may already have lost the power to shock."

Updates, 6/23: Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "If history has established the banality of evil, The Road to Guantánamo illustrates its rank stupidity." She notes that the Tipton Three "are tortured with death metal played at deafening levels, and later, after they're cleared but before they're released, they're rewarded with Burger King and Pizza Hut. The idea that 'American culture,' which we've slowly allowed to be supplanted by corporate capitalism, has become a handy instrument of torture and as well as its hasty palliative is curious to say the least."

In the Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson talks with Roadside Attractions partner Howard Cohen about the chances they've taken picking up the film for distribution in the US.

IndieWIRE interviews Mat Whitecross.

Slate's Dana Stevens finds the film "exhausting, depressing, slightly nauseating, and unfortunately necessary.... A detractor might point out that this film never allows for that possibility the boys actually were in Afghanistan for nefarious purposes in October of 2001. A defender might counter that, given that the United States couldn't come up with a justification for their detention even after the case went before the Supreme Court in 2002, the burden of proof hardly rests on Michael Winterbottom."

Online listening tip. Ruhel Ahmed and Michael Winterbottom are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Christopher Campbell at Cinematical: "I think that it needs to be appreciated foremost as an astonishing tale of survival, a kind of modern Odyssey with a touch of the old mistaken-identity scenario, presented in a pointedly discriminating first-person narrative.... Basically The Road to Guantanamo is just good storytelling."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "It's impossible to walk out of this film feeling any less than righteously enraged, but we couldn't help feeling manhandled as well — the film's purpose may be to pull strings, but Mr Winterbottom, must you tug so hard?"

Doug Cummings: "To its credit, the film isn't sensationalistic nor is it political agitprop. While the violence is concrete and upsetting, it's virtually tame by contemporary Hollywood standards.... Ultimately, the film seems less conceived as a political document than a memorial to [the camp's] victims."

Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker: "It's the most important and to my mind best movie of the year."

Updates, 6/24: At Movie City News, Larry Gross responds to David Poland's take: "The issue-problem here is that, for better or worse, Winterbottom struggled to stay as close to the eye-view of the people he made the film about. A comparable decision was made by Greengrass in [United 93]. (I'd love to see the two of them gab about the similarities and differences in their approach and results.)"

Ruthe Stein in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Like An Inconvenient Truth, The Road to Guantánamo is a film that must be seen to understand the sad truths of our times."

Chuck Tryon: "[W]hile suspicious viewers may be able to 'nibble at the factual edges of this film,' as Andrew O'Hehir of Salon puts it, I believe it's almost impossible to shake the larger argument of the film that - in Guantánamo at the very least - the United States is not living up to the values of human rights and justice that it claims to be promoting in the Middle East."

Posted by dwhudson at June 22, 2006 7:13 AM