This year’s Academy Award-winner for Best Documentary, Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side is yet another film about the war in the Middle East, and another treatise that’s critical of U.S. policy. Delivered in a subdued, almost sedate tone, Gibney’s film is the opposite of a gimmicky Michael Moore movie (it beat out Moore’s Sicko at the Oscars), but is just as merciless in its assessment of what Gibney sees as our government’s failures. His last film deconstructed the fall of Enron, and here Gibney breaks down the steps that led to the widespread application of psychological torture techniques in U.S. military holding facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at Guantanamo Bay.
He does this via the story of Dilawar, an Afghan cab driver who in 2002 died at a U.S. prison in Bagram. Subject to interrogation techniques that many believe are inhumane and cruel, Dilawar eventually succumbed to injuries he sustained at the hands of American soldiers. Gibney lays out his case slowly and methodically, with a combination of interviews and archival documents, and he has access to an impressive range of people. Many of the soldiers who were stationed at Bagram and engaged with Dilawar talk on-camera of the harsh tactics they say they were told to use, and a number of former government officials lay out soberly and clearly how official policy either explicitly or tacitly endorsed practices that it’s hard not to view as torture.
Like Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight (another of this year’s documentary Oscar nominees), which dealt with the early days of the Iraq war, Taxi gets its power from its lack of hysteria, and from its parade of official-looking guys in conservative suits—people like Lawrence Wilkerson (who was also a key figure in No End in Sight), Colin Powell’s former chief of staff; Alberto Mora, former general counsel for the Navy; and Sen. Carl Levin of the armed services committee. These are not left-wing radicals; they are thoughtful, well-meaning government figures who bolster the case that what happened to Dilawar and what was condoned at places like Bagram and Abu Ghraib was illegal and immoral.
Gibney, who also narrates, clearly has a great amount of sympathy for the on-the-ground personnel who were ultimately held accountable for both Dilawar’s death and the exposed events at Abu Ghraib. He shifts blame to the higher-ups, people who crafted policy that purposely evaded the Geneva Convention and forced untrained recruits to act as interrogators without any real sense of how to do their jobs. And he gets a surprising number of those people to talk on the record, as well, giving the film a sense of balance even though its ideology is never in doubt.
That dogged thoroughness actually hurts the film as a narrative, though: Gibney moves from what happened to Dilawar to the interrogation policies of the U.S. military to the history of psychological torture itself. Long stretches of the movie go by without a single reference to Dilawar or Bagram. And points get hashed and rehashed by each new expert or insider, conveying depth and diligence, but eventually serving to exhaust the audience rather than enlighten it. The carefully modulated tone becomes a bit stultifying over time; it’s hard to believe that even the former Bagram and Guantanamo prisoner that Gibney interviews never gets angry or raises his voice.
Visually the film is simple and uniform, without any cinematic flair, presenting all of its images, both horrific and mundane, with the same dull matter-of-factness. Only Ivor Guest’s ominous score works to engender a sense of unease and menace. The photos of abuses at U.S. facilities, even the familiar ones from Abu Ghraib, pack more power than the carefully reasoned arguments, but together they work to create a convincing, if overstated, case.
Taxi to the Dark Side
***
Directed by Alex Gibney
Rated R