'Inside Guantanamo': Constrained by Its Intentions

If ever a subject called out for the gray solidities of old-style, middle-of-the-road, five-W (who, what, when, where, why) journalism as practiced in the '50s, it is the place called Gitmo, the constellation of American prison camps administered by the armed forces at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yet that clumpy, dull professionalism is exactly what National Geographic's "Explorer: Inside Guantanamo" is unable, to its shame, to provide.

Instead: art. Oh, please, NG, say it ain't so. We don't want art, we want facts. We don't want attitude, we want statistics. But the production is so busy admiring itself as stylization that it exiles us from its more appropriate information-presenting function. It demands attention to its texture, to its ironies, to its loving sense of surrealism. It seeks to marshal anger that it cannot earn on the strength of its own reporting.

Filmmakers Jon Else and Bonni Cohen were granted nearly three weeks of unrivaled freedom to penetrate six of the seven camps that make up the Gitmo archipelago. They were prevented only from entry into the seventh, where high-value detainees were held, and they were prevented from showing the faces of detainees. They got to hang out with guards and to follow the day-to-day workings of the place. We see more of Gitmo than we've ever seen before, but what we retain from it isn't outrage that this was done in our name, but regret that Else and Cohen have seen too many Errol Morris films.

No doubt that Morris is a great filmmaker, but his stylistics are so ingrained that they now seem banal to everyone in the world, except Else and Cohen, who evidently didn't get the memo. Thus the film arrives festooned in stock Morrisisms: a moody, dissonant musical score, meant to pound you over the skull with attitudinal cues; a wholly absurdist passion for racing, low clouds, particularly over famous government shapes like the Capitol dome; sped-up sequences that reduce institutional regularity to a blur and communicate the sameness of day after day; a soundtrack engineered to play up the clanky, vibrational clang of metal closing on metal.

Of course Morris, from his breakthrough in "The Thin Blue Line" to last year's "Standard Operating Procedure," a self-styled forensic examination of Abu Ghraib, has an advantage that these filmmakers don't: He builds his work around investigations, with their built-in narrative elements and their final arrival at a destination of "truth." Else and Cohen don't have the stuff to "investigate"; the film isn't based around any particular incident but is by its very definition -- and by the limits placed on it by its military monitors -- more of a still life or an X-ray: It can only show what is, not penetrate in any meaningful sense. Thus the emotional values tend to be inventions of the director, imposed by him on the materials instead of emerging organically from them.

But if you peel away all the poetic touches, what you see is something spectacular mainly in its dullness, not its scandalousness: It is a prison. Men are locked up. It is kept scrupulously clean. It runs full-bore 24-7. There's really too much to do to engage in hate, and the torpor of the quotidian, the first-this-then-that of the place, overwhelms everything. It is not the banality of evil by a long stretch; it is the banality of banality.

The movie is so much better when Else and Cohen focus on individuals, and let them be who they are, and chronicle them in their daily duty lives. The piece's "heroine" -- despite its documentary trappings, it does establish a moral landscape of good guys (civil rights lawyers) and bad guys (Bush admin justifiers) -- is Sgt. "Jane Smith" (no real names given), U.S. Army, a decent small-towner. Freckly and slight, wan and reluctant, she seems not the sort to don a transparent plastic face mask and crash a suicidal prisoner's cell in order to get him to life support in a medical (or suicidal) emergency. You can read the contradictions of her position in her body language: She pounds the corridors with her team members, checking for suicide attempts every three minutes. It's a long, dreary duty day, work you wouldn't wish on a dog or an enemy, emotionally depleting and terrifying: She recounts a nightmare where she's alone, unarmed, her radio isn't working, and They are out. They, of course, are the shadowy forms seen through the opaque glass that separates guard from detainee -- this is a gray-bar hotel without gray bars.

The other hero is Brit Moazzam Begg, a cosmopolitan gentleman nabbed by U.S. forces and held at Gitmo for two years. His eventual release could be used as evidence that the system, though sluggish, clumsy, wretched, frequently wrongheaded, eventually works.

Instead, playing his oh-so-civilized British accent off against the clanking of doors (clank, clank clank) he is made into a martyr, a symbol of injustice, though even he admits he was under close scrutiny by British intelligence as a possible al-Qaeda suspect for years before his arrest in Pakistan (not London). Is he a good guy or not? The film doesn't know, it only takes his word for it without doing any independent investigation. Yet it clearly means to celebrate his release, and a last scene of him, reunited with family, adored by and adoring his beautiful daughters, is meant as the emotional upper upon which the film concludes.

Now and then, almost by randomness it seems, the filmmakers uncover a little masterpiece of human interaction. One such is a transaction, between a seemingly earnest young American guard and a detainee on the other side of the opaque door, over the issue of which book to read from the guard's library cart. The choices boil down to some unreadable classic by Louisa May Alcott vs. some 900-page monster by Stephen King. One wonders what the detainee would have made of either of them! Anyhow, the guard tries to steer him to King, not on the grounds that it's better or more modern, but that it's longer and will eat up more of his time.

Much less successfully, the filmmakers envision the film as encapsulating a legal history of incarceration policy in the war on terrorism, and while examining Gitmo's day-by-day, cut away again and again to lay out a narrative of the Bush administration's original policy and its challenges in the courts, which gradually, over time, deconstructed and deemed illegal many of the original precepts. This is perhaps a fine subject for a documentary film, and I'd like to see Charles Ferguson, whose "No End in Sight" remains a model of fair-minded policy examination, make it. Here, however, it's not enough; these are very tough issues and they demand our brightest minds working them hard and in detail. When they're nutshelled and rushed through as a kind of counter-narrative, they feel flimsy and unconvincing.

To be sure, "Inside Guantanamo" makes an attempt to play fair. It actually remembers a day when airliners hit skyscrapers and returns to that footage, so that viewers recall what drove the creation of the place. It gives the Bushies ample time to make their points and doesn't hector or ambush them after the fashion of a Michael Moore. And it acknowledges (but hardly emphasizes) that a number of released detainees have gone back to terrorist activities, including at least one suicide bomber. But clearly it buys into the narrative: Gitmo, a stain on our nation.

Gitmo: palace of ominously closing doors and barbed wire. Gitmo: It's not the American way. Nowhere does it confront the hard calculus of incarceration in the matrix of legitimate national security issues that the Bush people faced on Sept. 12, 2001. A better work, a more mature and self-restrained work, would confront and dissect and evaluate that narrative as its premise, not its assumption. That would truly be journalism as art.

Explorer: Inside Guantanamo (two hours) airs tonight at 9 on National Geographic Channel.