Taxi to the Dark Side tells the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention in Bagram — sister prison to Abu Ghraib. Kind of. Well, sometimes it tells the story of Dilawar, but mostly it just uses his story to carry the emotional weight of American policy regarding the incarceration and torture of suspected terrorists. It won the Oscar for best documentary feature this year, so, aptly, it is an uncommonly thoughtful, well-researched look at controversial American policy, though the results of the decision to underpin the politics with the personal story are somewhat mixed.
On one hand, Dilawar provides the perfect case study for the topic writer-director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) is interested in discussing. On the other, the details of his story are easily communicated in two or three sentences, and the film's incessant reference to him sometimes feels exploitative. That isn't to say it's ineffective, just that, after the first two or three mentions, direct reference starts to be a little superfluous.
The remainder of the film is the expected manifold talking heads, interspersed with clever investigative segments and bits in which the camera pans over declassified documents and moves in on two or three words, dramatically bringing them into focus. In other words, it's exactly the film that you imagine when someone says “a documentary about American foreign policy.” It isn't a particularly interesting or creative way of making a non-fiction film — like, say, Ghosts of Cite Soliel — but it is an example of excellence in a more traditional approach to the form.
This lukewarm praise for Taxi admittedly stems somewhat from its subject matter. For anyone with an interest in America's torture policies (and regular access to the Internet), it doesn't put forth any information that's shocking or new. Instead, Gibney attempts to bridge new connections within that established knowledge, and in that, he's very successful — if somewhat dull. Taxi certainly won't change the minds of anyone who doesn't have a pre-existing interest in documentary filmmaking, but it is a treat for those who do.
Ultimately, the problem with Taxi is that Gibney wants you to be outraged. He wants you to throw yourself out of your armchair, grab a picket sign (or maybe a hand grenade) and take to the streets. “The American constitution is being violated!” He shouts from behind the camera. “Bastard! How can you just sit there with your bag of cheese pretzels and surf the Internet all day?” Unfortunately, a great deal of his fervour is diluted by the ponderous, thoughtful style of the film, and anyone who watches it will be more likely to pick up a Naomi Klein book on the way home or get in the tub for a big ol' think. Gibney forgets that Dilawar — the emotional hook of the piece — was key to our outrage, but at this point, he's been lost beneath a sea of Donald Rumsfeld stock footage and interviews with FBI senior interrogators.
It's difficult to meaningfully criticize a film for succeeding in being exactly what kind of film it tries to be. With Gibney's latest, however, what kind of film it wants to be is at odds with the message it attempts to leave its audience with. At the beginning, Gibney shows us how Dilawar was killed by an entrenched bureaucracy that's more concerned with the appearance of success than it is with prosecuting the guilty. At the end, the film seems to have lost sight of him as well.
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