Kristen Stewart's US soldier falls in love with a wild-eyed detainee behind the razor wire of Guantanamo Bay. Now what could possibly go wrong?
Camp X-Ray, the debut feature from writer-director Peter Sattler, is a platonic Romeo and Juliet tale in which the characters converse at length across the great divide, separated by wire-mesh glass or chain-link fence. If nothing else, Sattler's fumbled Gitmo romance proves that its star, Kristen Stewart, is well set for a fulfilling career outside the lucrative Twilight franchise. But the film itself is so crude and overstretched, it's a wonder she doesn't attempt to tunnel out before the credits roll.
Stewart plays Private Amy Cole, swamped in fatigues, her hair scraped back and sent behind the wire at Guantanamo Bay where she distributes rations and library books to the luckless detainees. Locked inside his cell, Ali (Peyman Moaadi) decorates styrofoam cups with elaborate mosaics and clamours noisily for the final book in the Harry Potter saga, the only resolution he can conceive of after eiight years behind bars. Ali is wild and disruptive, pegged as a problem prisoner, although Cole finds herself curiously drawn to his sad eyes and bookish ways. The soldiers hate her talking to Ali; the inmates hate him flirting with Cole. The world is conspiring to keep these kindred spirits apart. The prison library does not stock Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Nestled somewhere deep inside Camp X-Ray - possibly in handcuffs, conceivably hooded - is a decent, heartfelt film just longing to be free. Sattler deserves credit for spotlighting the dehumanising conditions inside Guantanamo, where the detainees go insane in their cages and start throwing their faeces and making mischief in a desperate bid to keep the boredom at bay.
The performers, too, do the best they can. Moaadi (so good as the shifty dad in the A Separation) is suitably anguished as Ali, while Stewart copes well as his pensive prison guard, constantly trying to act more tough than she is. It's a role that reminds us what a fine performer she was in the likes of Into the Wild and Adventureland, before her turn as mopey Bella Swan steered her into a creative cul-de-sac.
I just wish the film had given her more to work with. Instead, the supporting players are little more than equal opportunity stereotypes (frothing Islamists; brutish grunts), while the dialogue is a clatter of cookie-cutter exposition, intent on telling us everything but explaining very little. Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.
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