Thomas Sutherland’s reaction to the HBO movie “Hostages” was astonishment at how true to life the ordeal of being kidnapped and held prisoner by Middle East terrorists has been portrayed.
“Frankly I was kind of shocked at the reality of it. I watched in amazement. To see somebody re-creating what we had been through so vividly and so accurately-I was kind of blown away,” said Sutherland, the former dean of agriculture at the American University in Beirut, who was kidnapped in 1985 and held until 1991. (For the record, neither Sutherland, nor any of the other prisoners depicted, was paid by the producers.)
Sutherland, who is played by Josef Sommer, is one of five men taken captive by the Iranian-connected Hezbollah in the mid-’80s whose horrendous experiences are depicted in the film.
“Hostages” (premiering at 7 p.m. Saturday with repeat showings throughout the month) is billed as a co-production with Britain’s Grenada TV, but that’s somewhat misleading. The docudrama is a British production partly financed by HBO. Thus the foremost characters are English TV newsman John McCarthy and Northern Irishman Brian Keenan, a lecturer at American University in Beirut, played by Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds, respectively.
It isn’t until about a third of the way through that Sutherland; Terry Anderson, Beirut bureau chief of The Associated Press; and Frank Reed, a Beirut private school principal, are introduced. At this point, McCarthy and Keenan are thrown into the same makeshift cell in a Bekaa Valley house as the other three. Jay O. Sanders plays Anderson and Harry Dean Stanton is Reed.
The atrocities, indignities and mental torture inflicted on the men is depicted with brutal explicitness.
The slightest infraction of rules, which the captors invent as they go along, incites a rifle butt to the gut or a punch to the face of the bound and blindfolded hostages. Their food, such as it is, is served with insects crawling on it. Bathroom access is limited even for someone with diarrhea.
From time to time, each prisoner is pulled aside and told he is being released. With hopes soaring, he is then informed it is a false alarm and thrown back into the dungeon.
Understandably, some of the hostages would like to get back at their captors, Sutherland said, but he is not among them.
“Anger and bitterness are very consuming emotions,” he said. “If I were to get angry about these guys, I would have to take time out of my life. And I would get ulcers.”
