Well it’s Oscar season so I thought I would try something a little different with the newsletter and pick out a couple of films (with a legal angle to them) to review. This week I watched The Mauritanian, a film that was actually a surprising snub for the Oscars even though Jodie Foster recently won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Based on a true story, Foster plays the real-life lawyer Nancy Hollander who is attempting to get her client, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (played by Tahar Rahim), out of Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo is probably the most famous prison camp in the world and yet we don’t really know that much about what goes on inside. The Mauritanian offers a horrifying answer to that question but the really disturbing aspect that stays with you after the credits have finished rolling is the legal system that allows such a place to exist in the first place.

At the start of the film Slahi is arrested and we later find out that he is suspected of being an Al-Quaeda recruiter for the 9/11 terror attacks. The film plays with the question of Slahi’s guilt but this actually serves as a distraction from the broader, structural issues at stake.

The time that we spend with Slahi in Guantanamo makes us think about the nature of evidence in the context of the law. Questioning begins as an almost amiable affair and this also operates as a way for us to get to know Slahi’s character on a human level before things get ramped up. Officials from within the U.S. government and military are so convinced that they have their man that it becomes clear they simply aren’t willing to accept ‘no’ as an answer. It should be noted that the film does not shy away from showing scenes of torture, and director, Kevin Macdonald, deserves credit for giving the viewer a small sense of the claustrophobia and disorientation that Slahi must have experienced in the camp. Before long the questions about whether Slahi’s own evidence is reliable turn into questions about whether the evidence ‘extracted’ from Slahi by his captors can be trusted.

Meanwhile in New Mexico it is Hollander who eventually takes up Slahi’s defence. The legal issues that she faces are not as serious as the torture that Slahi endures but they do feel just as intractable at times. Whether it is the documentary evidence that is almost entirely redacted or the coverage of Hollander in the press that suggests she is some sort of traitor who is defending the mastermind behind 9/11, her task feels like an impossible one for a justice system that is supposedly based on openness and the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

Benedict Cumberbatch (and his so-so North Carolina accent) plays the prosecuting lawyer whose story arc grants him a conscience while Shailene Woodley is Hollander’s assistant who wrestles with the weight of Slahi’s crime if he is indeed guilty. Don’t be fooled though; this story is about Slahi and Hollander with everything else acting as merely a frame. There are parallels in their stories as early brashness is replaced with a more quiet determination. When Jodie Foster and Tahar Rahim share a scene the intensity is almost overwhelming. They are on the same side but trust is not easy for either of them and has to be earned over time and in trying circumstances.

I won’t give away the conclusion of the film but the U.S. legal system gets off pretty lightly for the benefit of a Hollywood audience. This doesn’t completely detract from the powerful message that we see throughout but it certainly feels like a wasted opportunity to really question why the United States still maintains a highly secretive detention camp outside of its own legal jurisdiction.

In the same way that the successful prosecution of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for the murder of George Floyd does not itself address systemic issues of racial injustice in the U.S., the conclusion of The Mauritanian should feel more like a beginning than an end.