The Mailbag: Oscar-Nominee Defends Film
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:
Posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008
Under: Corrections, The Mailbag | 3 Comments »