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Terror's AdvocateA weirdly nonjudgmental movie about a lawyer who never met a terrorist he wouldn't defend.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007, at 6:34 PM ET

Omar Radad and Jacques Vergès in Terror's AdvocateTerror's Advocate, Barbet Schroeder's film about Jacques Vergès—the lawyer on every terrorist's speed dial—is ostensibly about the difference between representing mass murderers and believing in their causes. Many good lawyers justify representing bad people as a commitment to legal principles that transcends the crime at hand. Jacques Vergès seems to do it out of love. In fact, the movie, which opens this week in Washington, D.C., begins as a smoky love story starring Vergès and Djamila Bouhired—the Algerian woman who planted the infamous "Milk Bar" bomb during the Battle of Algiers in 1956, killing 11 people and wounding five. Not only did the newly licensed Vergès save her life by flying in from France to represent her with an operatic defense that turned Bouhired into La Pasionaria—the face of Algerian freedom—he also fell madly in love with and married her. For a while.

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Terror's Advocate would have been problematic enough had Schroeder limited his inquiry to Vergès' moral transition from Bouhired's starry-eyed counsel to the hired gun of seemingly every terrorist and despot on the planet: Vergès has maintained an international network of friends and clients ranging from Pol Pot (responsible for the slaughter of 1.5 million Cambodians) to Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon") to Carlos "the Jackal." But this is not really a movie that asks the question, "Why do good lawyers defend bad people?" Schroeder doesn't seem to much care. To the great frustration of some viewers, Schroeder largely declines to judge Vergès' ethical choices, and with the exception of a few platitudes about the need for a vigorous defense, Vergès does little to reveal his moral world. But that's because Terror's Advocate is less a film about ethical choices than it is about the theater of ethical choices.

Schroeder's movie is not an indictment of the man who famously offered to defend Saddam Hussein, though it's not a tribute, either. Like any good love story, it's more complicated than that. The real arc of this narrative follows Vergès from his first love—of the Algerian resistance movement as personified by Djamila Bouhired—to his increasingly hollow efforts to replicate that love affair with his successive clients. Schroeder offers us a Vergès who wants only to recapture the glory of 1957, in which he single-handedly saved his client from a death sentence with a theatrical trial and a publicity blitz that turned her into "the Joan of Arc of Algeria."

But as he aligns himself with one terrorist after another, Vergès stops asking whether they are truly noble freedom fighters and begins simply insisting upon it in the courtroom. He stages endless revivals of Djamila's trial and falls in love with each client and each cause without any real regard for what they have done or why. By the end of his career, he is defending the world's most despicable killers, lovingly casting them as new and improved Djamilas, absurdly describing even Pol Pot as a misunderstood victim of colonial aggression.

It's tempting to line Vergès up next to Alan Dershowitz (whose work Schroeder explored in Reversal of Fortune), Lynn Stewart, or even the lawyers currently defending detainees at Guantanamo, in an effort to find some unifying principle or characteristic of people who defend criminals and terrorists. But Vergès stands for no principle, he never speaks loftily of the law ("not an odious profession") or of the truth-seeking function of an adversarial system. The legal principle he appears to cherish is ambiguous, but it may be no more complicated than "the show must go on." A master of the so-called "rupture strategy"—a defense in which Vergès accuses the prosecution of the same offense as the defendant—it may look like he's profoundly devoted to the oppressed or the abused. But what he's really devoted to is the thrill of upending the moral universe. He isn't committed to representing the oppressed and the abused. But he does delight in finding a way to cast each of his increasingly vile clients in that light.

"In every trial, we'd say torture was used," he smiles. But it's a mistake to ascribe this strategy to some sophisticated strain of moral relativism; the notion that every wrong is itself a product of an earlier wrong. The charm of the rupture strategy for Vergès lies in the gorgeous theater such ironies can produce. Our protagonist talks little of justice or law, and focuses on staging. Describing his Klaus Barbie defense, he grins slyly: "It was up to us, within their set, to improvise our play." Vergès is all about showmanship: Shift some props, re-drape a costume, and presto! Yesterday's terrorist is today's freedom fighter.