Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Gitmo drama ‘Camp X-Ray’ disappoints at Sundance

PARK CITY — Kristen Stewart stars as a green Army private sent to work as a guard at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in the so-so character study “Camp X-Ray.”

The film starts out looking like a War on Terror take on “Fort Apache, the Bronx” in which the law-enforcement side has to stick together and maybe take a few ethical shorcuts against permanent near-riotous conditions. But then it settles down to focus on two characters — Private Cole (Stewart) and a charismatic, handsome detainee (Peyman Moaadi) from Bremen, Germany. He chats her up about Harry Potter while she’s delivering books, and despite a slight setback in their relationship (he throws a cup of his own poo on her, an act apparently well known in the trade as a “s–t cocktail”) she gradually finds it difficult to keep her poker face and becomes strongly emotionally attached to him from the other side of a locked door. She also has doubts about her own place in the overall mission.

First-time writer-director Peter Sattler promised a packed house at the Eccles world premiere that this wouldn’t be the Gitmo film we were expecting, and indeed the film wasn’t blatantly political and seems well-researched. Dramatically, though, the film is lacking; the pace is far too slow and despite Stewart being onscreen in nearly every scene we hardly get to know her until the closing minutes, when it’s far too late to care. As fellow guards misbehave, I expected the film to make the point that the jihadis (who are shown being force-fed and forced to sleep with the lights on) have more humanity than their captors, but the film doesn’t go that far. The problem is that it doesn’t say much of anything else either, except that people from both sides of a conflict can respect each other, and that maybe the detainees should be allowed to commit suicide if they wish. Try putting that on a movie poster. Commercial prospects are poor to nonexistent. I can’t imagine any major distributor will bite.