Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 18, 1993 TAG: 9302180275
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
`HOSTAGES' IS A GRIPPING DOCUDRAMA
What's it like being held hostage by terrorists? No one wants to learn the answer to that question the hard way. HBO, as it happens, offers a relatively easy way: "Hostages," a sobering docudrama that premieres Saturday.The 95-minute film seems longer, perhaps because so much of it details life in bitter captivity. A prologue points out that more than 50 Westerners were taken hostage in Beirut from 1984 to 1992, but the film concentrates on six of them. These include familiar names like Terry Anderson and less familiar names like John McCarthy.
At times, the six share the same cell. At other times, they are divided up and stashed away in separate filthy quarters. Blindfolded, shackled, stripped of most of their clothing, arbitrarily smacked around, they might at any moment be uprooted, wrapped in tape like mummies, and driven off to a new hiding place.
The film, co-produced with HBO by England's Granada Television, repeatedly mingles actual news footage with re-enactments. The technique, as always, seems fraught with the potential to deceive. But the producers insist that their version of the hostages' lives in captivity has been heavily researched to ensure authenticity.
Scenes of the hostages sweating it out alternate with dramatizations of efforts to free them on the outside. Kathy Bates plays Peggy Say, Anderson's sister, who made a very public crusade of her efforts to get her brother freed. In one bitter scene, she visits the State Department only to be told of a new governmental policy: "The hostages are to be devalued," a bureaucrat says coldly.
The rationalization behind this is that if the U.S. government remains officially indifferent to the plight of the hostages, they will lose their value as bargaining chips to the terrorists and be released. There's no sign this strategy worked. But then there is no conclusive sign it didn't work, either.
Scenes of the hostages being tormented, either by their captors or by the intense sense of loneliness and isolation, are grueling but not gratuitously violent. Writer Bernard MacLaverty and director David Wheatley do give you an extremely discomforting idea of what it must be like to be locked away with no concrete hope that you will ever be released.
Where the filmmakers go astray is in attempting to humanize the terrorists, especially toward the end of the film. First there is a soul-searching soliloquy by hostage Anderson on the unfairness of the word "terrorist," which he compares to racial epithets. Nonsense.
Then the filmmakers attempt to show the hostage-takers as being prisoners of circumstance almost to the degree that the hostages are. They are political impotents, it is suggested, for whom the taking of hostages is the only recourse. No matter how hard it tries, though - and why does it? - the film cannot create sympathy for these thugs.
Flaws aside, "Hostages" continues in the HBO tradition of tackling hot topics in intelligent and well-made docudramas, as it did last year in films about abortion and the Exxon Valdez disaster.
A commercial network making a movie on the same subject as "Hostages" would likely do a maudlin tear-jerker with the crueler realities muted, and the blunt language toned down.
"Hostages" is television with class, but it is also television with guts.
Tom Shales writes about television for The Washington Post.