The pandemic sent all of us down content rabbit holes. Before, you might only have enough free time to skim the surface of a subgenre, now you suddenly had the need to fill hours and hours. It’s what led me to watching something like By Dawn's Early Light a made-for-TV movie from the 80s about nuclear war[1]. It’s also what led me to seek out every courtroom drama and legal thriller that I could find. I plumbed the depths of John Grisham, and friends, I found the bottom of that particular well quickly - The Chamber was released in 1996. It stars Gene Hackman and Chris O’Donnell[2], and it’s about a lawyer (Chris) who may or may not be up to the task of representing a death-row inmate (Gene). As you’re watching, you’re also aware of the fact that you’re watching a young actor (Lil Gene’ nee Chris) who may or may not be up to the task of sharing a screen with one of the greatest actors of all time[he isn’t]. It’s not a good movie. At one point, Chris O’Donnell yells “I am focusing on the law, Bubba.” No one’s name is Bubba in the film. And with a whimper, my strategic reserve of unwatched courtroom dramas was depleted. This late-stage Grisham that was coasting off the fumes of his earlier work was the end of the line. For the rest of the pandemic, I waited with hope for new entries or to discover hidden classics.
The Mauritanian trailer was an oasis. It was published on December 1, 2020 which, little did we know at the time, was still so early into our long and unceasing relationship with the novel coronavirus. It has all the markings of a good movie: Jodie Foster, a BBC Films logo, and, again, Jodie Foster. It should also have been catnip for the hordes of yuppies like me locked up and looking for things to watch. It came and went with so little fanfare. Worldwide it grossed 7.5 million dollars. Domestically, it made $800,000[3]. Only 32 thousand people have logged it on Letterboxd. That’s around the same amount of people who, at the time of writing, was released only in theaters ten days ago. The Mauritanian barely exists, and on the surface there’s no good reason why. This is the exact type of movie that movie nerds lament not having more of: mid-budget, adult dramas. So what’s the deal? Is it bad? Or has something about our relationship with these movies changed? In the nineties dad airport novels, and the movies based on them, existed in the space that Marvel movies now fill. The original multi-verse involved lawyers in Savannah declaring things back and forth.
I wanted The Mauritanian to be great. I wanted the next Dark Waters or Michael Clayton. And it wasn’t. It’s certainly not bad. It’s mostly good! Jodie Foster remains Jodie Foster. She was nominated and won an AARP Movies for Grownups Award[4] and, as far as I can tell, is the same as almost any other award, with the very small distinction of highlighting when actors are older than fifty]. Tahir Rahim (the titular Mauritanian) has to do so much work carrying the emotional core of the movie, and he’s great. Shailene Woodley is fine! Everything about this movie is fine to good, but it doesn’t scratch the itch this type of movie should. A lot of that has to do with the subject material. Any legal thriller worth its salt has a triumphant leaving the courthouse scene. It’s the genre’s less-exuberant version of the successful, we brought ‘em home cheer at Mission Control. The story this movie is telling doesn’t allow for that, and that’s a big piece of it, but it also feels like that type of celebration just doesn’t play the same way these days.
The subject material, unsurprisingly, makes it tough for anything in this movie to be too jubilant. The treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners was so obviously wrong and so painfully ignored for so long. The triumph of the lawyers in the film is getting things back somewhere near neutral. No one is in a better place at the end of the movie than at the start. A wrong hasn’t been righted; instead we see a multi-year ordeal of somebody who is never actually charged with a crime.. And, to add injury to injury, after Tahir Rahim’s character is formally not charged with a crime, he still has to stay in jail for several more years. His treatment becomes emblematic of how capricious and absurd the legal system is: a fact we’ve become more and more aware of as a society in recent years. I think it’s that tension that makes these movies more and more untenable. The version of justice you need to make a satisfying one-of-these doesn’t jive with our understanding of the world. (The Trial of the Chicago 7)[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1070874/] feels like the best recent example of the gauzy view of American justice you need to have to fully invest in a classic courtroom drama. The whole time you’re watching and listening to actors get up and deliver Aaron Sorkin’s speeches about what America really means, and instead of it all feeling uplifting, it feels small and naive, dangerously out of touch with the actual world[5]. The most successful recent examples of these types of movies are Michael Clayton and Dark Waters. In both, you’re dealing with large civil suits against polluting companies that play dirty pool to try and avoid paying for their crimes. They sit halfway between The Mauritanian and The Trial of the Chicago 7. While their victories are relatively small, they still present a world in which the guilty can be held to account. That might be the best we can hope for.
While most of The Mauritanian’s problems are related to its subject material and the challenges around creating a satisfying movie based on a decades-long program that tortured people just outside of the jurisdiction of the American legal system, it suffers from a much less consequential, but equally egregious issue: Benedict Cumberbatch’s southern accent. As an aside, I wish I loved anything as much as Benedict loves playing real guys. I ran out of words to link there. Those are just the tip of the iceburg. Couldn't even make it to the most recent and most pretend-sounding of them all.[6]
I might be especially sensitive to the accent work as someone who has had a somewhat uneasy relationship to my own southern accent throughout my life, but come on. This sounds like Foghorn Leghorn’s first semester at Juilliard. And it’s not just Benedict. [Chuck] (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1157048/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t45) is in the mix talkin’ bout’ ‘fellowship and football’ while drinking a longneck Bud. It’s lazy and it doesn’t have to be. The South is way more interesting than this, and it has way more things to make broad generalizations about than whatever accents are happening throughout. This is something I find myself caring more and more about the older I get. It’s a weird hill to die on, but I guess everybody needs something to take a stand for. This is mine: maybe consider hiring southern actors to play southern people?
It was…fine ↩︎
In researching this I learned that Chris' middle name is Gene, and it's fun to imagine him trying to strike up a conversation with Gene Hackman about how he hoped to one day be a good enough actor to deserve the name Gene, and then Gene Hackman said something completely unrelated as if he weren’t paying attention, but really he was just sparing the kid’s feelings. Maybe Chris tried it again later, and at that point, Gene just fucking lit into him. ↩︎
One-tenth of a Blackhat! ↩︎
a thing that absolutely exists ↩︎
N.B Sorkin’s triumphant reference to J. Edgar Hoover in Being the Ricardos ↩︎
I'm going to present two historical figures one Benedict actually portrayed, and one he hasn't, and I want you to guess which is real. Movie A: Benedict Plays Louis Wain, a nineteenth century artist who draws surreal cats. Movie B: Benedict plays Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American scientist who invented the zipper. Movie A is real. ↩︎