On Thursday, I attended the premiere of Strip Search, an HBO short film by Sidney Lumet, director of Network and Dog Day Afternoon. Lumet was there. He's over eighty years old, but he's still working, and he looks and sounds great. In the question-and-answer session that followed the movie, he was unfailingly sharp and funny, and I'm glad that I had a chance to see this legendary old man in action.

The same can't be said for Strip Search, unfortunately. It's a drama about the fictional detentions of two people after 9/11, one an American citizen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) interrogated by a Chinese officer, another an Arab student interrogated by an American intelligence agent (Glenn Close). The movie cuts back and forth between the two interrogations, often using the same dialogue for both, to emphasize the fact that both detainees have been stripped of their rights. If this sounds overly schematic and obvious, well, it is. It's the sort of premise that David Mamet might have loved, but Mamet would have injected the drama with ambiguity and shifts of power, and might even have allowed the detainees to briefly turn the tables on their interrogators before their final destruction.

The biggest problem is that the innocence of Lumet's two detainees is never in doubt. Not only does this make Strip Search ineffective as cinema, it also hamstrings it as a persuasive political argument. Opponents of the Bush administration's detention policy, as ill-advised as it may be, have to confront one compelling argument on the administration's side: a rollback of the Bill of Rights might well be justified if we can use it to fight terrorists and save lives. As hollow as this point may seem, you can't just sidestep it entirely. A movie about two innocent detainees isn't an effective response to this argument; if anything, we need someone to make a movie about two guilty detainees, and show, through rigorous dramatic logic, that even if an unconstitutional detention policy can be used to capture terrorists, the tradeoff isn't worth it. David Mamet, are you reading this?