Film review

  • Roll Red Roll

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nancy Schwartzman (2018)

    A local radio station in Jefferson County, Ohio broadcasts early reports of an alleged sex crime.  The anchorman describes the incident as ‘very much a he-said-she-said at this stage’.  The assault of an underage teenage girl, the subject of Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary Roll Red Roll, didn’t stay that way for long.  Sixteen-year-old Jane Doe, as she’s referred to throughout (with occasional bleeps to erase her real name when it crops up in police interview recordings) was too drunk to remember how she came to wake up naked in a basement room, in the company of three teenage boys.  They were much more communicative, having taken and sent to their friends photos of what was being done to her.  Phone messages to and fro supplied a running commentary on the events of the night.  Marianne Hemmeter, on behalf of the Ohio Attorney General’s office, prosecuted at the subsequent trial of Trenton Mays and Ma’lik Richmond (also both sixteen when the assault took place).  Hemmeter tells Schwartzman that the Steubenville High School rape, as it became known, was one of the first cases to rely on unarguable evidence of this kind.  The defendants condemned themselves out of their own texts.

    In 2012, when the crime was committed, Mays and Richmond were leading lights of the Steubenville High School football team.  According to trial transcripts, the already intoxicated Jane Doe left a party with them and two of their football teammates.  They called in briefly at another party, where the girl appeared to be ‘out of it’ and vomited.  Twenty minutes later, they headed to the home of a schoolmate, Mark Cole.  On the car journey there, Mays raped Jane Doe and exposed her breasts while his companions took photos and videos.  In a basement room of Cole’s house, Mays attempted oral rape on the girl, who was now unconscious.  Richmond then had vaginal sex with her.  More photographs were taken and shared.  The stream of phone messages continued in the immediate aftermath of the crime:  Mays begged the victim not to press charges and told Mark Cole to ‘Just say she … passed out’.   The bulk of the evidence presented in court comprised hundreds of texts and phone photos, taken by more than a dozen people and subsequently transmitted via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Mays and Richmond were tried as juveniles and judged ‘delinquent beyond reasonable doubt’ (the equivalent of guilty in a juvenile case).  Each received a one-year sentence for raping Jane Doe while she was unconscious.  Mays was given an additional year’s sentence for disseminating pornographic images of her.

    The main evidence was unusual both in a technical sense and in (thereby) recording so graphically the callous derision of the boys concerned – who numbered more than two.  Cody Saltsman, another Steubenville footballer, posted on Instagram a photograph of the unresponsive victim being carried, by her wrists and ankles, by two other boys.  A YouTube video featured Michael Nodianos, who was on the baseball rather than the football team, joking that ‘They peed on her – that’s how you know she’s dead because someone pissed on her’.  Mays likened the victim to ‘a dead body’ and described her as ‘deader than Caylee Anthony’ (a two-year-old girl murdered in Florida in 2008).  The case quickly became a national cause célèbre and an expanding cultural indictment.   It exposed the pernicious potential of social media and jocks-will-be-jocks team spirit.  It shone a disturbing light too on the local community ethos more widely.

    The high school football team was – perhaps still is – a source of fervent pride to the citizens of Steubenville.  Schwartzman’s film is named for the team’s supporters’ traditional come-on-you-reds-equivalent chant.  There are scene-setting shots of high-school boys and girls co-operating in a more positive context – footballers and cheerleaders lining up to receive the acclaim of their families and friends.  For viewers (like me) who come to the film with no advance knowledge of its subject, Roll Red Roll delivers a real sting in the tail.  As media interest in the case snowballed, there were persisting rumours that high-school employees, notably the football coach Reno Saccoccia, tried to protect the boys involved for the sake of the team.  Shortly after Mays’ and Richmond’s conviction in March 2013, the Ohio Attorney General set up a panel to investigate whether other similar crimes might have been committed.   At least one had, in April 2012:  the victim, a fourteen-year-old girl, came forward in the light of the publicity around the August 2012 assault.  On this earlier occasion, the school authorities more successfully kept a lid on things.  The panel investigations led to the indictment of five adults on various criminal charges, mostly tampering with evidence and obstructing the course of justice.  They included the IT director and the superintendent of Steubenville City Schools.  The latter, Michael McVey, appears briefly in Roll Red Roll, offering a news interviewer stonewalling assurances that the relevant procedures were all correctly followed.   McVey can’t help the way he looks and sounds but he comes over as a perfect representative of boorish rigidity.

    The same local radio voice who announces breaking news of the crime is soon heard again, editorialising along the lines that sometimes girls have a few drinks, decide they want sex then claim afterwards that they didn’t.  He isn’t alone in begging the question of what Jane Doe was capable of deciding.  Two Steubenville High School girls take the line that she has to take responsibility for her decision to leave the first party with Mays, Richmond et al.  (It’s worth noting, whether or not it made a significant difference to the feelings of these two girls, and others in Steubenville, that Jane Doe wasn’t a local:  according to Wikipedia, she was from Weirton, West Virginia.)  Ma’lik Richmond’s defence attorney says the victim decided at some point of the night to hand over her phone:  he virtually elides the distinction between this and consenting to all that happened subsequently.  The same attorney goes on to note that the boys were drunk too and asserts that, when both parties are blotto, it’s hard to judge ‘who’s raping who’.  His and the girls’ contributions appear to be retrospective rather than instant reactions, conveyed to Schwartzman in interviews presumably conducted several years after the events in question.  That these are considered views makes them all the more startling.

    Nancy Schwartzman tells her ramifying tale clearly and calmly, using a combination of talking heads, police interview recordings, TV news film and on-screen reiteration of the text exchanges.  Her numerous interviewees include J P Rigaud, the chief detective in the case; Rachel Dissell, a journalist at The Plain Dealer, the major newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio; and true-crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, whose efforts first triggered controversy (Cody Saltsman’s parents sued her) and wider public interest in the case.  By early 2013, the Steubenville High School crimes had given rise to public demonstrations in which women of various ages and backgrounds came out as rape victims.  In the closing stages of the film, Goddard discloses that she’s one of their number – that she was sexually assaulted (it’s not clear when) by her then boyfriend’s brother.  Alexandria Goddard would be a key figure in the story, almost its moral conscience, without this personal testimony.  Yet it somehow puts the seal on the dismaying narrative of Roll Red Roll.

    5 July 2020

  • The County

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Héraðið

    Grímur Hákonarson (2019)

    It’s not every week you see two films from Iceland – A White, White Day, followed by The County.  The first, needless to say, has been labelled Nordic noir; the second, in terms of its basic David-and-Goliath scenario, might suggest Icelandic Ealing.  Not Ealing comedy, though – or that’s what I thought having sat through The County.  Yet Wikipedia terms it a comedy (and IMDb as ‘comedy, drama’).   Some people are easily amused.

    Tonally different as they are, A White, White Day and The County have points in common.  Both are the work of writer-directors.  Both have rural settings and landscape is an important expressive element.  Both feature middle-aged protagonists who discover something unexpected and disturbing about the much-loved spouse they’ve lost in a road crash, and are mourning.  In Grímur Hákonarson’s film, Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) helps her husband Reynir (Hinrik Ólafsson) run their dairy farm, which is seriously in debt.   The regional rural economy is controlled, with an iron grip, by a long-established agrarian co-operative, headed by the discreetly malignant Eyjólfur (Sigurður Sigurjónsson).  Originally set up as a means of ensuring a fair economic deal for farmers, the co-op has warped into an oppressive commercial monopoly.   It purchases its members’ produce and forbids them to buy supplies independently, even though they could so less expensively.

    In the aftermath of Reynir’s death, Inga is faced with a triple whammy.  First, she learns that the farm, which has been in her husband’s family for generations, is in much deeper debt than she’d realised.  Next, she finds out that Reynir, with no other means of keeping the co-op off his back and thus holding on to the farm, was a key part of their virtual protection racket, informing on other farmers whose commercial practice broke the co-op’s rules.  Then she’s told that medical and other evidence suggests his fatal crash wasn’t an accident.  Inga tells her two adult children their father took his own life but not what drove him to do so.  She takes to her Facebook account to denounce the co-op as the ‘Icelandic mafia’, and gets plenty of media publicity as a result, but she doesn’t go public about how it exploited Reynir.  Why don’t these things happen?  From Grímur Hákonarson’s point of view, it isn’t time yet.

    Refusing to give in immediately to the co-op by declaring herself bankrupt, Inga instead launches a campaign of resistance to their iniquitous operations.  This isn’t as eventful (or as entertaining) as might be expected.  When Eyjólfur’s piggy enforcer warns her about importing cheap fertiliser from Reykjavik, Inga chucks a shovelful of the import on the windscreen of his car.  Having first threatened to sell her milk online instead of to the co-op, she then drives her red tractor into town and sprays milk over the co-op building.  That’s about it until she has the idea of creating an independent outfit to protect her and her fellow dairy farmers’ interests.  She and a couple of Reynir’s friends knock on a few doors.  Next minute, Inga’s proposal is on the agenda for a plenary meeting of the co-op membership.  (Media interest in her crusade seems to have dried up by now.)

    Inga introduces the proposal, to gales of applause.  Eyjólfur sneaks in and comes to the platform.  One of Inga’s supporters complains that Eyjólfur isn’t entitled to speak (why not?) but he’s not to be deterred.  The reaction he gets suggests he’s won the audience over (how come?); the person who said Eyjólfur had no right to address the meeting is now struck dumb (why?).   Inga therefore has to speak again, this time from the floor.  Now’s the moment to go public on Reynir’s dirty work for the co-operative and how he couldn’t live with the shame of it.  More acclaim (this is a rapidly volatile group of voters).  When a show of hands is called, Grímur Hákonarson keeps the camera close up on Inga’s face – to increase the suspense!  It takes only about three seconds to do the count:  you’re inclined to wonder if nearly everyone in the room – there must be around a hundred people – sat on their hands, despite all the noise they’ve been making with them.  Whatever, the proposal is passed, to a final burst of thunderous applause, but Inga hardly has time to celebrate before she’s evicted from the farm.  She doesn’t bother to tell any of her allies (or her children) about this.  She just lets her dairy herd wander into the fields, puts her dog in the car, and drives away.  It’s Time to Move On.  Simple as that.

    The County starts with Inga, calmly determined, helping a cow to calf; feeding a queue of hungry cows is the last thing we see her do before the co-op delivers its eviction order.  The farming sequences hardly amount to the ‘rich … specific procedural detail’ commended in Sophie Monks Kaufman’s Empire review but they’re fine as context – and the brief scenes of Inga and Reynir together are good.  They don’t say much to each other, for several reasons.  They have to work so hard to keep the farm going they’ve hardly the energy for conversation but you get a sense in these sequences, too, of a strong, longstanding mutual affection that isn’t emotionally demonstrative.  On Raynir’s part, of course, the lack of words is also a matter of concealment.  The County starts promisingly but the longer it goes on, the cruder it gets.  Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir, a well-known stage and screen actress in Iceland, is naturally credible and commanding but Inga is at the centre of a primitive piece of storytelling.  Hinrik Ólafsson’s Raynir is the first of numerous burly, bearded men in evidence.  All the others are such sketchy characters that none stands out from the hirsute crowd.  Lean, clean-shaven Sigurður Sigurjónsson (one of the police officers in A White, White Day and the co-lead in Grímur Hákonarson’s previous feature, Rams) can’t fail to make more impression as Eyjólfur.

    Despite questioning its ‘comedy’ credentials, I did find things in The County amusing.  For any Briton of my generation and background, the many subtitles referring to ‘the Co-op’, and its characterisation as a bastion of baleful protectionism, are bound to be funny.  The closing sequence, where Inga sings along to a wry motivational song playing on her car radio, also raised a smile.  It made me wonder if the material would have been better as a full-scale musical (The Co-op!).  As for intentional humour, though, I couldn’t see either the ‘absurdist comedy’ or the ‘bone-dry black comedy’ that Mark Kermode perceives.  He’s far from alone in admiring The County.  It sometimes seems that a film needs only to evoke a politically significant theme for right-on critics to decide it’s thereby explored the theme thoroughly – hence the praise for Hákonarson’s treatment of globalisation, the resilience of community, and so on.  It’s true that, as I write this, there are only 23 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes but they’re nearly all from British and North American critics, and they’re nearly all positive – I’m not sure the RT designation ‘fresh’ is appropriate in this case.  The County is a comedy in the sense of being yet another foreign-language arthouse film that, had it been made in English, might well have been critically laughed off the screen.

    4 July 2020

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