Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Murder on a Sunday Morning

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (2001)

    On Sunday 7 May 2000 James and Mary Ann Stephens, a couple in their sixties from Georgia, had breakfast in the Ramada Inn in Jacksonville, Florida, where they were staying.  On their way back to their room they were accosted by a gunman, who demanded Mrs Stephens’ bag.  Before she could hand it over, the man shot her in the face, killing her instantly.  The murderer was a young African-American and, within a few hours, a black teenager called Brenton Butler, on his way to submit a job application to a Blockbuster Video store, had been picked up on the street by the Jacksonville police and identified by Mr Stephens as the man who shot his wife.   By the end of the same day, the police had a statement from Butler, confessing to the murder.  According to Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s film, there was no other incriminating evidence:  the gun wasn’t found; there was no forensic evidence to implicate Butler (or anyone else, since the police chose to ignore the discovery of Mrs Stephens’ purse several miles away); no other witnesses saw fifteen-year-old Butler around the Ramada Inn at 7.30am that day and his parents insisted he was around at home then; the boy had no history of violence, shown no signs of any propensity to violence.  Through photographs of Butler’s bruised face and chest, his legal team was able to substantiate their claim that the defendant, who’d insisted he was innocent when first taken into custody, was physically assaulted by a homicide detective in order to extract an admission of guilt.  The case went to trial later in 2000 and the verdict was returned a couple of days before Thanksgiving.  It took the jury only forty-five minutes to find Brenton Butler not guilty.

    Murder on a Sunday Morning is a remarkable piece of film-making.  Because it’s largely on videotape I was surprised it technically qualified as cinema and that it won Jean-Xavier de Lestrade the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2002 but it’s good that it did.   Lestrade follows Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finney, two attorneys from the public defender’s office, as they construct their defence of Brenton Butler.  I wish I knew how this project got off the ground but it provides footage which is really extraordinary:  parts of a crime investigation which normally have to be reconstruction are the real thing here.  There is, for example, an early case meeting – of the defence lawyers, the prosecutor from the state attorney’s office, and one of the policemen who picked up Butler.  (The meeting is designed to clarify the circumstances of his arrest and identification by James Stephens.)  Then there are the scenes of Butler’s parents visiting him in his cell – enough in themselves to expose the falsity of the police claim that, when Butler first saw Detective Michael Glover, the black detective who later assaulted him, the teenager exclaimed, ‘Am I glad to see you!’ and hugged Glover.  Even in these deeply emotional meetings with his parents, Butler doesn’t show his feelings in that kind of way.  The actual court proceedings are fascinating to a degree I’ve never found in the excerpts we see on the news of American TV coverage of high profile trials like those of O J Simpson and, in recent weeks, Michael Jackson’s doctor.   Lestrade’s calm, skilful organisation of the material suggests objectivity; in fact, he’s highly and unambiguously partisan.  The tension between the two approaches is compelling – or was for this viewer anyway:  I didn’t know the outcome of the trial.

    Lestrade inserts into the chronological sequence of events interviews with Pat McGuinness and Ann Finney which were evidently shot after the trial (or, at least, after their questioning of particular witnesses at the trial).  McGuinness, in these bits, is quietly, eloquently angry and, since it seems increasingly incredible that Brenton Butler had anything to do with Mrs Stephens’ murder, I started to get a sinking feeling.  I began to suspect that – because a dramatic twist was needed to eclipse a predictable not guilty verdict – the jury (with roughly equal numbers of black and white jurors) was going to reach an outrageous conclusion.  In the event, the relief you feel when the verdict is read out is so strong that a sense of anti-climax is the furthest thing from your mind.  But there is a twist or, at least, a surprising development after Brenton Butler has gone home to his family, and it’s this that makes Murder on a Sunday Morning stand out from most other accounts of people falsely accused of serious crimes.  In his closing address to the jury, Pat McGuinness reminds them that, thanks to the deeply flawed police investigation, the real killer has still not been caught.  In the moment he says these words, you receive them as a shrewd, rhetorical manoeuvre but you realise after the trial that he’s really troubled by this.  (It’s a main reason – along with the appalling experience Butler and his family have been subjected to – why the triumphant McGuinness still exudes anger in that post-trial interview.)  And he does something about it.  As a result of McGuinness’s efforts, Juan Curtis was eventually convicted of the murder of Mary Ann Stephens[1].

    The focus on the defence attorney here naturally reminded me of the 2004 TV documentary mini-series Death on the Staircase, whose central character, David Rudolf, defended Michael Peterson, on trial for the murder of his wife.  It turns out that Lestrade made that film too; the combination of the somewhat familiar technique and the fact that Peterson was convicted must have contributed to my apprehension that Brenton Butler was also going to be found guilty.  From what I remember of Death on the Staircase, I was impressed by and rooting for Rudolf but unable to decide whether I thought Peterson was guilty or innocent.  The piece ran 360 minutes all told so this kind of uncertainty was pretty essential if you were going to be kept intrigued.  Murder on a Sunday Morning, which lasts a little under two hours, is quite different and part of me kept thinking:  this is gripping but it isn’t complex enough.  The policemen in the witness box are physically repulsive as well as scumbags (especially Detective Duane Darnell, the one who penned Butler’s confession).  The close-knit, deeply religious Butler family are heroic (and both the parents are good-looking).  Racist members of the audience may also be grumbling, mentally at least, ‘I bet they wouldn’t make a film about a white youth charged with shooting a black woman’.  But the post-trial events confound these kinds of reservation and prejudice.   Ann Finnell is a formidable, likeable presence throughout but McGuinness – burly, chain-smoking, competitive, acerbically witty – is the star.  (If they ever make a fictional version of the case, Philip Seymour Hoffman would have to play him.)   By the end of the film, because justice has been done twice, he’s an authentic hero.

    10 November 2011

    [1] The events subsequent to the Butler trial are summarised on Wikipedia as follows:  ‘After Butler’s acquittal, his attorneys tipped the Sheriff’s Office to two other suspects, Juan Curtis and Jermel Williams.  Williams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against his co-defendant at the trial; he was sentenced to ten years in prison.  Curtis’ fingerprints were found on the victim’s purse, which had been recovered after the crime but had never been tested.  The Butler case figured into the new trial; the judge allowed Curtis’ lawyers to discuss the eye-witness identification, but ruled that Florida’s evidence laws forbade them from using Butler’s confession.  Curtis was subsequently found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. However, in 2004 appeals court found that the exclusion of the confession denied Curtis’ constitutional right to a fair trial, and granted a retrial. At this second trial Curtis was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.’

     

  • Munich

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2005)

    The speed and brilliance of Michael Kahn’s editing make Munich very exciting to watch even on television:  in the cinema its visceral power must have been irresistible.   Steven Spielberg – working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on a book by George Jonas – tells the story of how a group of assassins, on behalf of the Israeli government, hunted down the Black September terrorists responsible for the deaths of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.  The storytelling is highly accomplished yet the longer Munich goes on – and it runs 163 minutes – the less impressive it is.  I think there are two main and linked reasons for this.  The first is structural; the second is to do with Spielberg’s particular skills as a film-maker.

    The succession of assassinations, in spite of there being nothing remotely comic about them, calls to mind Kind Hearts and Coronets and Spielberg’s bravura staging of each killing makes you inclined to admire them as political action thriller highlights – to start comparing and even ranking them.  ‘Operation Wrath of God’ takes the avengers all over the world to find the wanted men and you start to think of the assassinations as the Rome one, the Paris one, and so on.  In Rome, the Arab assassinee buys milk shortly before he’s ambushed and it comes as no surprise that the white liquid spills and merges with the victim’s blood cinematically:  this sequence, although it’s gripping, goes on a bit too long.  The next episode in Paris, however, is hard to fault, with its suspenseful complication involving the Black September man’s young daughter, who you fear is going to be blown up.   The circumstances of the killings reflect actual events whereas the assassins are fictional characters.  At one point they seem to be getting killed off as quickly as their quarry.  This too tempts you into unseemly thoughts about which squad will have the last man standing.

    The upside of all this, though, is that because the action sequences dominate and command respect (as action sequences) you can also find yourself thinking the whole story is being handled in an admirably serious-minded way.  Kushner and Roth have certainly written plenty of crisp, intelligent dialogue, with less crude political point-making than might be expected.  But because Spielberg is absorbed in the technical challenges his shift in tone and emphasis in the last part of the film – to ask the question:  what did the Israelis’ revenge achieve? – is clumsy and anti-climactic, when it needs to be quietly devastating.   How you receive Munich as a moral essay is likely to depend on your political prejudices.  (Sally and I watched the film together. One of us was inclined to root for the Israelis; the other was readier to partake of the futility-of-vengeance theme.)  John Williams’s score, complete with its Schindler’s List echoes of Jewish lament, isn’t greatly helpful to Spielberg on this occasion.

    The principal character is Eric Bana’s Amer Kaufman, a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, chosen by Golda Meir (whose bodyguard he once was) to lead the assassination squad.  Amer, who leaves his post in Mossad to take up the assignment, is the only member of the team whose personal life is described in any detail.  When the squad starts work, his wife (Ayelet Zurer) is pregnant with their first child.  The development as characters of the other members of the team – played by Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz and Hanns Zischler – is limited, and we see them largely from Amer’s point of view.  The contrast between Eric Bana’s musclebound physique and sensitive face is effective, and he gives a good, conscientious performance – although you get the sense he feels under pressure.  Perhaps Bana hasn’t quite the variety needed to bear the weight of this major role.   He’s well enough supported by the others even though Ciarán Hinds is, as usual, a strong but overemphatic presence.  As Amer’s handler, Geoffrey Rush brings a welcome vividness to the proceedings but he too isn’t quite right – he’s a bit too theatrically vivid.   The two best performances, by some way, come from Mathieu Amalric as Louis, a French informant to Amer’s team, and Michael Lonsdale, as Louis’s father.   The character of Louis, with his Alsatian dog and tendency to speak in gnomic epigrams, seems to belong in a more light-hearted political thriller but Amalric is very true.   His accented English is so odd that it sounds believable and his sense of humiliation in the presence of his father comes through convincingly.   In the latter role, Lonsdale is so quietly magnetic and incisive that he steals the show.

    While violence is hardly in short supply, Spielberg deserves credit for the mayhem in Munich usually being startling because it means something (the arty images of shed blood in the Rome killing are uncharacteristic).  One of the toughest scenes in the film involves the murder by Amer and his remaining colleagues of a Dutch woman (Marie-Josée Croze).  They’ve discovered she’s a contract killer and responsible for the murder of the team member played by Ciarán Hinds.  They track this woman down in the Netherlands and shoot her.  She’s wearing only a bathrobe and it flaps open as she lies dying:  one of the men covers her up, another tells him to leave the robe open.  It’s a shocking moment but it makes good sense later on when the man who wanted the woman’s nakedness exposed expresses his regret for that (but not for her killing).   The scene also chimes disconcertingly with the moment we first met this woman, when she propositioned Amer in the bar of a London hotel.   The events of Munich in 1972 are well handled at the beginning – a splicing of live action and news footage.  But the later flashbacks to the Olympic village and Munich airport in Amer’s imagination are among the worst bits in Munich – especially an improbably realistic nightmare and a sequence in which Amer’s fevered imaginings are crosscut with him making aggressive love to his wife.

    23 June 2012

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