The Mailbag: Oscar-Nominee Defends Film
By Mary Pols
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:31 am in Corrections, The Mailbag.
I hate to put smart, talented Oscar-nominated Alex Gibney up on the same day as I post that raving email you’ll see below, but I do want to get a dialogue going here. I was surprised to receive this email from the director of the new documentary Taxi to the Dark Side yesterday (I thought only the Coen brothers emailed critics! Although I’ve never had that privilege. Probably because all I ever do is drool over their films). Anyway, Alex had read my review already and had this reaction:
Dear Mary:
Thank you for the very kind and perceptive review of my film, “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
I probably shouldn’t say anything but I was distressed by one thing you said: that Dilawar was “rendered merely as a sketch serving someone else’s purpose.” We did go to Afghanistan. We did meet his brother, his father, his beautiful young daughter. We see the rocks that Dilawar carried down from the mountain. We start the film in the village of Yakubi. We hear his brother, Shahpoor, say that, since Dilawar’s death Shahpoor can no longer taste his food. (I find that to be the most moving quote in the film but no American reviewer has even mentioned it.)
We can’t talk to Dillawar now; he’s dead. But I do think that, within the context of a film that was trying to show things from all angles, we rendered his life - through where he lives and memories of those around him - with a level of detail that honored his memory, not as a mechanistic plot device, but as a human being.
Best,
Alex
I’m so pleased that he wrote to me. Because there was a phrase missing from that review that I do believe I owed him. Something along the lines of “Despite what was obviously every possible effort to report Dilawar’s story” the taxi driver ends up being too much of a sketch of a person. In the review, I say that this is often the problem even with the best journalism. We peg a broader story on one person and then take off running. As a reader, I often feel short-changed by this technique, because I get sucked into the story of this particular person and I want to know more about them. From the still photos and information Gibney includes in this documentary, I can see that Dilawar, who was tortured by American soldiers who admit ON CAMERA (George Young, are you reading? Or can you see through that red haze of yours?) that they did so, was a slight, sweet-faced young man who left behind a grieving family, including a young daughter. Far be it for me to wish that an incredibly poor family from Afghanistan had a video camera around so that I could see actual footage of Dilawar as he lived. But I did feel a little disappointed as this excellent, tough documentary (one of five Oscar nominees this year) drew to a close. I was all too conscious of Diliwar as framing device, not as a man. But I do believe that the filmmaker tried his hardest under tricky circumstances (not just a language barrier, but a culture barrier). And it is to his credit that the death of a man I previously knew nothing about (I’d focused on the collective in the torture stories, not the individuals) weighed heavily enough on my mind to make me want more information about how he lived.
Alex, you want to fire back at all? It would be great to get a conversation going here:
[You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.]
February 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Ms. Pols;
I think my point about Dilawar is that the movie does not give us any information on him. More often than not, the people documented as unwitting victims of those evil nasty American soldiers, are not quite the pure, chaste Sir Galahad types that Hollywood and your average movie critic would lead us to believe.
It’s also one person in a war torn country. You can’t build a documentary around that. So what if it’s Oscar-nominated? If anything that should tell you all you need to know about the documentary and how much vetting was done on it.
Finally, Ms. Pols, I would suggest you find some of the Geneva Convention(S). Read them, at least an abridged version. It will help delineate Dilawar’s standing as an enemy combatant. It may also elucidate to you that if Islamic Jihadists choose to hide among their countrymen, and their countrymen do little, or nothing, about it, the consequences can be dire.
The Jihadists do not wear the uniform of a sovereign nation, and are therefore not entitled to the rights of the Convention(S). The U.S. military does wear the uniform of a sovereign nation (America, in case you’ve forgotten), and I can pretty much tell you that the torture standards of your average Islamic Jihadist don’t even come close to ours.
February 8th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Addendum:
Red Haze? What does that mean? Does that have something to do with Red State/Blue State? How about seeing your way through your Marijuana Haze? Is that a fair statement? Are you another Leftist, Bay Area Stoner with a short supply of brain cells.
Before you judge me on my politics, you may want to rethink your approach to one of the few people who still reads newspapers, whether you agree with him or not.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Mary:
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I, too, wish that I had more images of Dilawar and that I might have talked to him when he was alive. However, I will say that I still think that there is something haunting about the very fact that we know so little about him and have so few images of him. In fact there are only three. We know he screamed for his mother and father while he was chained and hooded, but we don’t know the jokes he told, the way he looked at his daughter. And yet that void is powerful, I think. In a narrative sense, he may be a device - as everyone in the film is - but I still think the film makes us feel his loss because we sense, in the pain of his death, and the grieving family he left behind, the joy that he once brought to those around him.
As for the man below, why do these comments always come from people who don’t bother to see the films? “Taxi” is not anti-military. Just the opposite. There is a prestigious group of former generals who have endorsed the film and it is now required viewing at the army JAG school. It’s a patriotic film.