At first blush, and perhaps unfairly, Camp X-Ray is a referendum on whether Kristen Stewart’s initial promise as an actress warranted grand expectations, or whether the multibillion-dollar Twilight franchise will haunt her forever. Daniel Radcliffe has taken great pains to claw his way out from under Harry Potter, and Stewart’s Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson continues to cling to auteur directors as a possible escape route from heartthrob status. In would-be blockbusters like Snow White And The Huntsman or award bait like Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (TMT Review), Stewart has failed to impress, continuing to sleepwalk through forgettable roles. Peter Sattler’s debut feature is the right kind of project for Stewart at this exhausted moment in her career, one that takes advantage of her ability to project a brooding, closed-off demeanor, just cracked enough to reveal something more underneath. It’s not a virtuosic comeback, but it’s a step in the right direction.
At the outset of the film, Army Private Cole (Stewart) arrives at Guantanamo Bay to begin a yearlong stint as a guard at the base. This involves subduing suspected terrorist detainees when they become unruly, and grueling shifts walking laps around a small 10-cell block of men in solitary confinement, including Ali (Payman Maadi), with whom Cole strikes up the slightest hint of a friendship. Sattler’s screenplay reveals precious little about the life of either main character. The opening sequence, of Ali being taken from his home in Germany and transported in black hood, orange jumpsuit, and sensory-deprivation earmuffs in planes, boats, and trucks on the way to Cuba, is a haunting montage that sets the scene even before the new guards arrive. Cole videochats with her mother at home in a small Florida town, she waves away any discussion of a man waiting for her back there, and socializes to a certain extent with her fellow soldiers. We’re deprived of information in the same way as the soldiers and detainees: they don’t know who is truly guilty, and the soldiers reveal nothing so it can’t be used against them during shifts.
The film both mocks soldiers for equating their positions with the detainees — one of Cole’s contemporaries even says the mess hall serves worse food — while compiling multiple parallel montages of Cole and Ali existing in physical and existential confinement. It’s essential that Camp X-Ray doesn’t devolve into political theatre, taking big soapbox stances on the ethics of indefinite imprisonment or the past decade of war. Instead, it’s moderately successful in putting forth plain, resonant truth: the situation at Guantanamo is untenable; there’s no end in sight; there will be more Private Coles every year thrown into the deep end guarding the detainees.
Maadi’s performance is the showier one, as he careens between unhinged and intellectually present. He unites with the other detainees in solitary to continually act out against the guards — throwing cups of feces, going on hunger strikes — primarily as acts of defiance just to demonstrate they have free will. But he also questions Cole as to whether the detainee library purposely doesn’t contain the final Harry Potter book. It’s a silly runner throughout the film, but that illuminates the gravity of the situation on this base in Cuba.
In its final third, as the film reaches the end of Cole’s tour of duty in Cuba and what it means for the tenuous rapport between her and Ali, the final “confrontation” of sorts feels contrived. It’s not that it’s unreasonable; just that the timing throws off the verisimilitude the rest of the film conjures. But the nature of the event aside, it questions whether Cole has progressed through something as simple as a character arc. Clearly she learns more compassion than many of her fellow soldiers, but Ali continues to push her to realize that opening her eyes doesn’t do anything but change her situation, because she gets to leave.
All of that gets inside your head. Early on in the film one of the new soldiers uses the word “prisoners” and gets reprimanded: Guantanamo houses “detainees,” a distinction made so that those imprisoned are not subject to the Geneva Convention. Throughout my notes and even in this review up until this paragraph, it felt like nicking a third rail every time I started writing any form of “prisoner,” then doubled back to replace it with “detainee.” That hyper-awareness may be the ultimate message of Camp X-Ray. We should always struggle to achieve the escape velocity necessary to see a moral quagmire for what it is, even if we feel nothing can be done to stop it.
