Critics praise The Mauritanian but call it a throwback, its cast better than the script. Audiences like it more than the critics, maybe because it’s the type of film that went missing from theatres even before the lockdown: an intelligent drama for adults.

The film tells the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held without charge for 14 years at the American military base in Guantánamo, Cuba. As I wrote earlier, Slahi was alleged to have recruited the jihadis who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. But his confession was extracted through prolonged and brutal torture and Slahi was never charged. A human rights lawyer named Nancy Hollander put years into freeing him. She also helped him publish a book, Guantánamo Diary, on which the film is based.

Starring Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster, The Mauritanian is a $14 million movie with a proven cast and good production values. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, it’s the filmic equivalent of a mid-list book, something else that’s disappeared over the past decade. These days we get $150 million blockbusters and small-budget art films. Bestsellers and literary novels from small presses. 

Thankfully, streaming services are changing the money side of movies again, and the middle ground is making a slow reappearance. Films like The Mauritanian and The Trial of the Chicago Seven, with its $35 million budget, are getting greenlit. Only a few years ago, even directors like Spike Lee could raise a scant $5 million to make a film. No matter how creative you get, $5 million nets you small casts and claustrophobic visuals.

I wonder if The Mauritanian strikes critics as old-fashioned because it takes them back to the days when movies looked like movies. In any case, I think they’re overly harsh. I enjoyed the film and recommend it, especially since the main performances are as riveting as everyone says, especially there work of Tahar Rahim as Slahi. 

But I do have one problem. It’s the same one I have with other recent films that critics give a more enthusiastic thumbs-up, including Promising Young Woman from writer/director Emerald Fennell. Nobody would call that one old-fashioned. Carey Mulligan stars as a woman who has lost her best friend to rape, then loses herself in an obsessive drive for revenge.

Promising Young Woman is often very funny, which unfortunately The Mauritanian never is. But the main characters in both movies are as relentless as most political discourse in the world today. They’re one note. Blaring. Although at the midpoint of both, as per every How-To-Write-A-Screenplay guide, there’s a shock and a reversal.

In The Mauritanian (spoiler alert) Slahi’s lawyer learns that he has confessed to being a terrorist. In the film, it doesn’t immediately leap to the mind of this experienced human rights lawyer that his confession was probably extracted under torture and carries no weight legally. Instead, it takes a good deal of anguished running around before the lawyer settles back into helping Slahi. Throughout, he remains blameless—which in real life, he probably (mostly) is.

Yet people are more subtle and inconsistent than the film allows Slahi to be, and Fennell’s film allows Mulligan’s character to be. The Mauritanian wants its hero to be faultless, the Good Guy writ large. It certainly wants him to be better than any of the flawed and jokey superheroes you see in blockbusters these days, which is a reversal in itself.

After watching the movie, I read a much more subtle New Yorker article about Slahi by the journalist Ben Taub, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the piece. He follows Slahi (here spelled Salahi) out of Guantanamo and back to Mauritania, where Slahi lives today. He’s forced to live there. The U.S. demanded that the Mauritanian government seize Slahi’s passport, effectively jailing him inside his own country. Slahi needs sophisticated gallbladder surgery, which a hospital in Germany has offered to perform, but he can’t travel without a passport. Once again he’s stuck someplace and struggling to get out.

It’s a long and multi-faceted article, exploring the complex story not just of Slahi, but of a U.S. army veteran named Steve Wood. Wood was one of Slahi’s guards in Guantanamo, and they became unlikely friends. Wood read books that Slahi recommended both before and after his service, and eventually—secretly—he converted to Islam. Taub accompanied Wood to Mauritania in early 2019 for a reunion with Slahi, and was with them during Wood’s four-day visit. 

“They prayed together,” Taub writes, “ate together, and enjoyed a picnic of bread and tea in the dunes of the Sahara. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantánamo detainee. Soon afterward, in a room at the same hotel, the U.S. State Department hosted a training session for Mauritania’s security-intelligence apparatus, on ‘Interdiction of Terrorist Activities.’ Salahi suffered night terrors, and Wood suffered a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal… Salahi handed him some leftover ibuprofen from the Guantánamo pharmacy.

“For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. Salahi was on a publicity campaign, to draw attention to the injustice of his withheld passport, and at times it seemed to Wood as if he were a prop—the former guard who recognized Salahi’s innocence. TV crews were present at meals, and an interviewer showed up at Salahi’s apartment, recorder in hand, and asked Wood, who still hadn’t told his brothers that he is a Muslim, to comment on his favorite Quranic passages, and to share his thoughts on the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. Wood complied—he felt that it was the least he could do for Salahi. During the Amnesty International live stream, someone on Twitter commented that, of the two of them, Wood looked like the detainee.”

So Slahi is an operator. No doubt he has to be; has had to learn how to be. In the end credits of The Mauritanian, the real-life Slahi is also pictured as a bit of a goofball, singing along happily to a Bob Dylan song in no particular key. “Listen,” he says. “This part is about me.” Slahi isn’t the unflinching near-holy martyr portrayed in the film. No one is. But the movie isn’t doing him justice when this is only suggested in the end credits, nor does it do justice to the adult audience it seeks.

Four stars? Not five. But worth watching if you have any free time lately. (Ha!)