Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

The Clear-Eyed Road To Guantanamo

I saw Winterbottom's film, The Road To Guantanamo. Then I checked out your piece, which I had remembered as a slam, and then realized you were a little more nuanced than a mere slam. You praised the filmmaking, making a favorable comparison with the Gore doc, An Inconvenient Truth, which is a bit like saying a girl's attractive since at least she's not as hideous as Whoopi Goldberg.

But interspersed were some attacking remarks that I didn't think we're entirely accurate.

You're negative on one issue that is purely a matter of subjective taste, that you made into a definitive ground for writing the picture off at the start of your piece. That is the question of whether the three guys detained at Guantanamo, Brits of Pakistani origin who wandered at best "irresponsibly" into Afghanistan in the middle of the U.S. invasion and whose story Winterbottom was moved to tell, aren't - in fact, or in the movie - the brightest tools in the tool closet....

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 Flight 93. (I'd love to see the two of them gab about the similarities and differences in their approach and results)

You said something interesting about Flight 93 - that for all its skill and taste and humanity, it couldn't be a masterpiece, because for it to be a masterpiece, it would have to do what Ford or Welles or Kurosawa or Kubrick do when they do politics and history, creating characters of a magnitude commensurate with the tragic scale of the material.

That is precisely the level at which the caveat should be directed at Winterbottom in my view.

This particular canvas was designed around the exact same determined limitation as the Greengrass film - to stay directly at the experiential level of the characters - not, in essence, to present an overview supplying a comprehensive ideological intellectual summary of What it All Means.

Having said that, Winterbottom and his co-director (Matt Whitecross) didn't only do this with great elegance, economy and skill. They also achieved something with it that, to me, was far more interesting than a hate letter to the Cheney administration. They create a painful, meticulous, depiction, of The Fog Of War.

As I watched, I was struck by how many anti-American, ideological condemnations of American actions WERE NOT IN THIS FILM. This is first and foremost an anti-war film, rather than an attack on American policy film.

As you show these three guys fleeing a Taliban stronghold, and getting in a van with Taliban fighters, you can see perfectly clearly, how "on the ground" they must have looked guilty to the soldiers that captured them. In a few instances, this has been held against the film, but to me it was evidence of its relative sobriety and objectivity.

You see how the victorious side, needing a payoff for the invasion, a "win" against Bin Laden, and, above all, needing some vestige of crumbs of human intelligence to define their new potently dangerous enemy, seize on three English speakers jumbled up amongst some captured Taliban.

Who wouldn't have wanted to believe they were a catch? Who wouldn't have assumed that if you were in Afghanistan on your own dime, you were a bad guy? And above all, didn't we need some detainees who could actually understand our questions, so that - god forbid! - one or two might get answered? Some people have attacked the movie on some of these grounds as if it, itself, didn't supply all this complicated information. If people in a few quarters have said they doubt the guys' innocence, do they happen to notice that it was the film itself that supplied them with the info for those doubts? Why so?

Winterbottom's point is that he can condemn a military judicial system run amok without denying that there were quasi-legitimate reasons and circumstances leading to mistakes that were made. (Note: To this day Andrew Sullivan attacks prisoner abuse and torture on his blog, daily dish, while continuing to offer measured support for Bush's Iraq policy.) The truth is we shouldn't be doing some of what we've been doing to detainees in Gitmo, whether they are innocent or not! That's our system. And - before the Cheney/ Gonzalez justice department - the rule of law. The ends justifies the means was supposedly the other team's method (Stalin).

Winterbottom did not make a movie in which you show American marines or GI's relishing the task of brutalizing prisoners. It shows a spectrum of behavior. Good, bad, so-so. The G.I. who kills a tarantula or who is charmed by one of the three prisoners rap-singing are as much a part of the story as the ones who are somewhat abusive.

I didn't come out of this movie thinking what immoral scumpits the GI's depicted were. I thought that they were, on the whole, poor fuckers holding the other end of the same shitty stick as their victims, obeying shitty orders and doing their level best for the most part not to do worse. And, on the whole, what Winterbottom and his team designed to show of their behavior was more restrained than you might have expected, given all the moral, emotional bureaucratic pressure on everyone in the middle of this mess to "show results."

I actually felt that given what we now know about the Cheney administration's rationalizations of torture (all their blatant unapologetic attempts to block the McCain anti-torture legislation) and desire to skip Geneva - which by the way, is going on vehemently and proudly as we speak - the movie is amazingly modest and disciplined in what it accuses individual soldiers of doing.

Later, as we see officer types representing the Military Justice System covering its ass, some behaviors are loathsome. BUT, the film never personalizes things and says these are bad people. They are all participants in a situation gone wrong, a situation going beyond control even (perhaps most) for the so called winners. A system goes on inexorably grinding its somewhat mindlessly destructive gears.

And that, David, is, I'm afraid, where we are.

I lived through countless movies, T.V. shows, and dramas, in the sixties, that wanted to tar the US Army as nothing but psycho-killers, with a lust for innocent Vietnamese (or other non-white ) blood. This dispassionate lucid movie was so not that.

Does Guantanamo eventually (surprisingly briefly) get to pressure positions, sleep deprivation, loud noise, sometimes not having blankets against the sun? Sure. But it never ever suggests that it was all that, only that, nothing but that. Thus the main accusation late in your piece -- "The movie is so clear about its statement that The Alliance and then The Americans are not just wrong but almost willfully wrong, that for me I felt like I as being oversold" is simply not factually true.

The whole point is that the bad things that are done late in the film are at the end of a long now-impersonal mechanism, one block turning over another till we're getting to torture. If anything it's remarkable how little screen time the worst stuff is given.

Again, the view of the guys is not that they are the three nicest, coolest, most wonderful people of all time, the view of the three guys is THEY COULD BE ANYBODY.

Years ago, in the height of Anti-American paranoia worldwide about Vietnam, the great Ingmar Bergman weighed in with a masterpiece called Shame. In a mythical country, fighting a mythical left-right wing war (we never learn whose right, whose wrong) an ordinary middle class couple Liv Ullman and Max Van Sydow (just linking their names gives me a little burst of mid-fifty year old nostalgia) are simply caught in the middle of horrible violence by people on both sides of the political spectrum. One loses their moral bearing. One just barely doesn't. One wasn't "better" than the other, though one ended up doing bad things that the other just barely resisted.

Bergman was inspired by a war he hated, but rather than make ideological points caricaturing one side, and elevating the other to some kind of purity, he made a work of art about experiencing directly the bestiality of war demonstrating that wars take the most ordinary of people and forces them, pressure them to the point where they do bestial things.

That, essentially, is what you have with Guantanamo (but none of the actors are quite as amazing as Ullman and Von Sydow). There's no lefty ideological blood-for-oil conspiracy being argued here. And Americans are not isolated off having any sort of sadistic relish for what is going on.

There is simply enormous pressure, enormous unleashed violence, and some very ordinary guys get the shaft (though, again the movie makes it perfectly clear that others had it worse, and some by inference better.)

The other great anti-war themed movie, I recalled watching Guantanamo was Paths of Glory--which, again, dealt with how in the fog of war, mistake bred on top of mistake, creating its own damaged death machine that starts to turn and stagger and sputter , leading inexorably to people of no particular indecency having a share in indecent actions. Of course that movie had an articulate conscience in Kirk Douglas, and exuberant hissable (if all too depressingly accurately depicted) villains in the generals played by Menjou and MacCready. But what was really profound about the movie was the sense of a detached, dispassionate view of folly on top of folly, getting to a point where nobody is in any real moral authority or control any more. The red god of war is eating everyone in sight.

Guantanamo, as I started by saying, does have a few of the faults that come from its rigorous reliance on, and limitation to, facts as these particular characters perceived them. The characters don't have the range and richness that a masterwork would require them to have. But still, it has all the virtues that go with that same rigor.

It doesn't idealize or sentimentalize its heroes, or turn them into some paragon of the ideologically "right" position, and its exposition of the things that we are doing on the ground in the Middle East, the grinding process of horrific mistakes, compounding more mistakes, gives an image of our nation's methods. That is precise, clear-eyed and above all, TRUE.

- Larry Gross
June 23, 2006

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.

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