'Taxi': A Shameful but Important Ride

Documentary Casts Cold Eye on Torture

Even the most dedicated supporter of the "war on terror" might have trouble digesting what Alex Gibney serves up in his latest film, "Taxi to the Dark Side," whether it's the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of freedom, or the people who've had to pay for those crimes, or the higher-ups who've run away from them and toward the tender embrace of the Patriot Act.

Lately audiences, too, have run, virtually screaming, from anything that smacks of an Iraq war film. This is perhaps understandable, given the issues, but while it's tempting to call Gibney's documentary "the one Iraq film you MUST see this season!!!" (which, by the way, it is), it's not just about Iraq. It's about torture as policy.

This may not, admittedly, be a big selling point. Perhaps currency is: It would be callous to call last month's reports out of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan -- where more than twice the number of detainees at Guantanamo Bay are reportedly still incarcerated -- as serendipitous for Gibney's documentary. But consider the movie's chronology and time frame: On Dec. 1, 2002, an Afghan cabdriver named Dilawar was abducted, likely by piratical bounty hunters working for U.S. dollars, and "never returned home," according to Gibney's own measured narration. Dilawar wound up at the infamous Bagram detention center and five days later was dead; a postmortem described his legs as "pulpified." "I was surprised it had taken one of them that long to die in our custody," remarks an interrogator Gibney interviews, one of the low-ranking people prosecuted while their superior, Capt. Carolyn Wood -- later to star at Iraq's Abu Ghraib -- was eventually awarded a Bronze Star.

Through the story of Wood and various other untouchables, Gibney tries and largely succeeds in establishing that torture was not the work of the oft-cited "few bad apples," but an institutionalized policy. Like Naomi Klein and her recent book, "The Shock Doctrine," Gibney sees the abuse of prisoners, many of whom had no connection to anything remotely resembling al-Qaeda, as part of an ongoing, widespread sociopolitical campaign.

"The only thing I know is, these are bad people," President Bush says via a news clip. A prison sentry at Guantanamo says of his charges, "They're here for a reason." The film's not-so-remarkable premise is that when people are (1) presumed guilty and (2) reduced in their captors' eyes to something less than animals, disaster seems inevitable.

"You always have people in the military who are just this side of the Marquis de Sade," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, onetime chief of staff to Colin Powell and one of Gibney's friendly witnesses. Whether the service people in charge of the Bagram and Abu Ghraib detainees were indulging warped desires is moot. Humanity is not. The testimony of the people who actually interrogated prisoners and were then prosecuted -- men such as the seemingly gentle Willie Brand, or Damien Corsetti -- are portraits of shame and anger, over what the men did, why they did it and how, in the end, they were hung out to dry.

No sympathy is shown the Dick Cheneys, Alberto Gonzaleses, John Yoos or Don Rumsfelds of the world, but such has been Gibney's MO: "Taxi" is his first feature-length documentary since his Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" in 2005, which did for corporate hubris what "Taxi" does for the concept of command responsibility. Previously, he wrote and produced "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," another idol-toppling political expos¿, and he had a new film, on Hunter S. Thompson, at Sundance this year. Turning his camera onto the late high priest of gonzo journalism was probably a purgative after the horrors of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the people behind what Gibney perceives as a philosophy of abuse.

"Taxi" is gorgeous, by the way -- perhaps perversely so, given its subject matter, though it accomplishes a certain kind of uplift in the face of otherwise squalid behavior. The precisely composed pictures created by cinematographers Maryse Alberti and Greg Andracke temper the utter despair "Taxi" might otherwise have engendered. Call it a copout, but I prefer to think of it as a stratagem: What does the beastly mean without the counterbalance of beauty? Give Gibney credit for providing a glimpse into some of the best that human beings can do, while also doing his best to convey the hows and whys of the worst.

Taxi to the Dark Side (106 minutes, at Landmark's E Street) is rated R for disturbing images, and content involving torture and graphic nudity.