"Taxi" Goes to Hell in a Handbasket

 The images in “Taxi to the Dark Side” are everything that a good noir murder mystery wants to be—gritty, disturbing, and even gruesome—except real. This documentary about the circumstances behind prisoner abuses at Bagram, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and countless other shadowy extraordinary rendition sites—as the euphemism goes—bluntly provides images worth seeing, alongside facts and interviews worth hearing.

 Alex Gibney does an outstanding job of obtaining the interviews that need to be heard, balancing their genuine accounts of the parts they played in instances of prisoner abuse and manslaughter with the almost humorous will-neither-confirm-nor-deny alibis of the political and military elite. It was surprising to be confronted with a first-hand testimony by John Yoo himself—formerly an important and influential Department of Justice official—when the significant use of archival footage had already set up the expectation that Yoo would not be heard directly. In comparison, other documentaries often give little, if any, voice to the “bad guys.”

 Directing, editing, and cinematography all take on additional importance in documentary, since the medium eschews actors for all but the occasional dramatization. Gibney takes a solid, opinionated stance against the excuses of our country's political elite, in spirit with “No End in Sight,” “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” all documentaries that involved him. His style approximates the authoritative judgment of a Michael Moore film—with more facts and less sensationalism—mixed in with the high-brow sophistication of Errol Morris' “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.”

 The cinematography works in concert with the editing, taking care not to obfuscate the words of interviewees or the procession of events and facts that lead up to Gibney's hard hitting points, but nor do they aspire to anything innovative. Music is integrated more soundly than in most interview-heavy documentaries, and the occasional pan-Islamic inspired interlude is a welcome departure from the usual dour classical movements.

 “Taxi to the Dark Side” is a solid documentary that burgeoning documentarians would be wise to learn from. It is resourceful in that it doesn't waste its own time, and fully exploits almost all the resources—especially interviews and archival footage—available to documentary filmmakers. It entertains with a peculiar brand of irony and dark humor as it points to the fumbling hypocrisy of the American political elite, while plucking the American heartstrings with the story of an Afghani man whose humanity remains poignantly preserved after his death.

 Good documentaries often seem to have an underwhelming impact on the actual course of events even when they bring up legitimate concerns in a convincing manner, as “Taxi to the Dark Side” does. However, the Obama administration has already made progress in closing down Guantanamo Bay, halting extraordinary rendition, and restricting the very methods of CIA-style psychological torture that “Taxi” raises grave concerns about. Perhaps art can function to make a difference in the political sphere after all.