Bruce Beresford (1999)
Although Libby and Nick Parsons live the high life, on an island off the Washington coast, their marriage isn’t in good shape – it doesn’t help that Libby (Ashley Judd) knows her shady businessman husband (Bruce Greenwood) is under investigation for embezzling funds. To rekindle their relationship, they embark on a romantic sailing weekend, while Libby’s friend Angela (Annabeth Gish) looks after the couple’s four-year-old son, Matty (Benjamin Weir). The weekend gets off to a successful steamy start but Libby wakes in the night with the sheets and her hands bloody, and Nick nowhere to be seen. She follows a trail of blood that leads her to a knife on deck. She’s holding the knife when the Coast Guard arrives on the scene, in response to Nick’s call, saying he’d been stabbed. Libby stands to pocket $2 million from a life insurance policy in her husband’s name: Nick’s body isn’t discovered but his wife is convicted of murder. After agreeing to care for Matty while Libby’s behind bars, Angela goes incommunicado. With the help of her son’s school, Libby tracks Angela down to a San Francisco address and phone number, and calls her on the prison payphone. Midway through the conversation, Libby hears Matty call out ‘Daddy!’ She realises, and we see, that Nick is alive and well, and shacked up with the woman Libby thought was her best friend. Margaret (Roma Maffia), a fellow prisoner, used to be a lawyer. She suggests that Libby, once she gets out of jail, should kill Nick: the ‘double jeopardy’ clause in the US Constitution, Margaret explains, means you can’t be convicted of the same crime twice …
This film isn’t recommended if you’re
(a) looking for a crime thriller that’s either inventive or exciting;
(b) in need of an engaging heroine: Ashley Judd’s Libby seems sullenly cut off much of the time – on the relatively rare occasions that she’s distressed, she comes over as self-pitying;
(c) already sorry, without knowing about Double Jeopardy, that Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Crimes of the Heart, Driving Miss Daisy and more) saw his stock as a director fall during the 1990s, since when it hasn’t recovered.
After six years, Libby is granted parole and placed in a ‘halfway house’, though she soon goes AWOL in her quest to find her family. She’s lucky that her parole officer, Travis Lehman, is determined to join her on the quest whenever Libby hasn’t escaped from him. The audience is even luckier that Travis is played by Tommy Lee Jones: Double Jeopardy is worth sitting through for him and him alone. This isn’t the first or the last time that Jones has made a ropy film watchable. If ever an actor’s face has been rightly described as ‘lived in’, it’s this one. He delivers David Weisberg and Donald Cook’s often mediocre dialogue with amazing pace and deadpan wit. (Why has Tommy Lee Jones, with these talents, never been in a Wes Anderson cast? Probably because he’d remain too individual for that cinematic control freak’s liking.)
It’s not worth saying much more about Double Jeopardy, except with reference to the film’s Wikipedia entry, which includes a ‘Misinterpretation of the concept of double jeopardy’ section:
‘The newspaper column The Straight Dope observed, “a crime, for double jeopardy purposes, consists of a specific set of facts. Change the facts and you’ve got a new crime … no one would believe that a person convicted of beating Richard Roe to a pulp on December 8th could avoid another conviction for tracking down poor Rich in February and whaling on him again”.’
Libby does eventually kill her diabolical husband but that never seems her priority. She wants Matty back and finally succeeds: the film ends on a freeze frame of mother embracing son (now eleven years old and played by Spencer Treat Clark). Ashley Judd has made Libby so strangely cold for so long, though, that even this ending isn’t heartwarming.
9 July 2025
