Movie Breakdown: The Dissident (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
For as much news as I’ve read I haven’t actually spent a lot of time with the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian government. This documentary will hopefully fill in some holes.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian journalist who after years and years of working for the government, started to balk at the stunning abuses of power in the uber-conservative country and started reporting on them. Eventually the government turned against him, he fled to America and became a writer for the Washington Post. In October of 2018, he and his fiance went to the consulate in Turkey to get their wedding license. A group of men followed him, tortured him, killed him and then hid his body. These men worked for the Saudi Arabian government. It is an awful story about an assassination by an oil-rich government still roundly approved of by the United Nations (Trump’s United States in particular). The documentary – by Bryan Fogel (an Oscar winner for the equally explosive juicing doc Icarus) – is a smoothly polished, beautifully produced piece of film. Fogel jumps back and forth between Khashoggi’s life and the investigation of his murder (and fascinatingly the boneheaded cover up perpetuated by the government of Saudi Arabia) and has one race towards its deadly conclusion and the other race towards some amount of resolution, its amazing how much tension the director is able to inject into a story who’s ending has already (to some degree) occurred. I feared for Khashoggi over the course of the film. I fretted when he made bold statements against the Saudi Arabian government. I shook my head when he finally entered that fateful embassy. It’s that kind of documentary but it does not trade flash and excitement for depth. This is a layered film that lays bare the structure of Saudi Arabia governmentally and the deeply religious, deeply conservative and fiscally-driven platforms they stand upon. And it’s the money that Fogel shows to be so scary because with the amount of money Saudi Arabia is able to field on even given day, to any given country, choosing to work with their government – or in this case, protect their government – becomes less of a moral decision and more of a financial decision.
One Last Thought:
It’s nice in the wake of the ever-receding Trump administration to reminded – again – just how terrible and overtly evil Donald Trump Jr. is and was in his time in office.
