The Mauritanian: A nightmarish ordeal gets second billing to a less compelling tale of legal wrangling

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

I direct you now to the end of The Mauritanian, the adaptation of Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s best-selling memoir of his 14 years as a Guantánamo Bay detention camp prisoner. Not the end of the story, but the credits themselves.

That’s where docudramas often introduce the real-life characters who inspired the film. And that’s where we meet the friendly faced Slahi – at one time hyped by U.S. intelligence as a “mastermind” of 9/11 – flashing a playful grin at the camera and singing along, word-for-word to Bob Dylan’s The Man in Me, a song best known for its soundtrack use in The Big Lebowski.

Tahar Rahim, in his Golden Globe nominated performance as Mohamedou Slahi in The Mauritanian

I wanted to get to know that guy.

Instead, Slahi’s memoir, as told in The Mauritanian by director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), is a legal procedural, in which two lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) battle need-to-know bureaucracy, redacted classified documents and every other hurdle that can be placed between you and a client in a locked-down detention center on foreign soil.

Meanwhile, ironically, military attorney Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch, who seems to love tackling Southern U.S. accents), faces exactly the same obstacles in his marching orders to get a death sentence for Slahi. It speaks to the absurdity of “classified” intelligence culture that its rules seem designed to obstruct justice for the innocent and guilty alike.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

This drama, a build-up to a defining court case that never quite happens, takes up the bulk of the movie and has the severe tone of a network TV procedural series. 

And yet, it’s the precious few scenes involving Slahi (Tahar Rahim, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance) that make the movie compelling. These include: his family life, his few human interactions at Guantanamo, his virtual speech about American justice to a U.S. court, and the brutal, almost-psychedelically dreamlike scenes of waterboarding, sexual humiliation, threats to his family and other ordeals.

Through it all, Rahim maintains the apparent indefatigable spirit, and even cheer, of his real-life character. One gets the impression from the performance that Slahi simply did not fit the role of “insane terrorist” in which U.S. intelligence insisted on casting him, though they spent 14 years trying to make it stick. 

There’s a subtlety to it. And Macdonald, for his part, tries to keep doubt open for as long as possible, leaving narrative breadcrumbs to make us stop and think, “Could this likeable young man be hiding monstrousness behind his smile?”

That vibe also defines the relationship between Hollander and Duncan. The no-nonsense Hollander (does anybody play no-nonsense as well as Jodie Foster?) professes to not care whether Slahi is guilty or innocent, the Holy Grail of a defence lawyer. As she starts out, she confesses she doesn’t even know where Mauritania is. 

Woodley, meanwhile, plays Duncan as a bit of a mouse, whose commitment to the case seems contingent on her devout belief in Slahi’s innocence. 

For his part, assessment of his accent aside, Cumberbatch doesn’t have much to play with. Couch takes the case, ostensibly to get revenge for a pilot friend who was killed in the terrorist attacks. But all it takes is one visit to Guantanamo to shake his faith in his task. It’s an A-to-B character arc, below Cumberbatch’s pay grade.

Though it’s a movie with an identity crisis, Rahim’s magnetic performance carries enough of The Mauritanian to make it a worthwhile watch.

The Mauritanian. Directed by Kevin Macdonald. Starring Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tahar Rahim. Opens Friday, February 26 in select theatres where open, and on Tuesday, March 2 in premium digital and On Demand.