![]() ![]() But also: She’s not stupid, and she get sucked into the anomalies of his case, and drawn into the possibility that he might actually be as innocent as he claims. She’s not stupid: she figures he’s most likely guilty. He’s been on death row for years at this point, several appeals already exhausted, and she’s just a nice stranger lady willing to befriend a lonely soul, no matter what he may have done. ![]() Who knows what to believe about what happened, what he’s accused of, and where the truth lies? TFW you have to assure your friends that your do-goodery is not a cover for a romance with a death-row felon…Īnd then, about 40 minutes into the film, the always enrapturing Laura Dern ( Cold Pursuit, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) shows up as Elizabeth Gilbert, a kindly bleeding heart who gets swept up into Willingham’s story. Emotional engagement with Willingham here is a fucking roller coaster, because he’s played by the stunning Jack O’Connell ( Unbroken, ’71), one of the most intriguing young actors working today: he is so very capable of selling both charming psychopathy and wounded innocence. Yet at the same time, the bar is very high to imagining anyone killing their own children, even if we know it does happen with depressing regularity. Here we meet Willingham as the film opens, with the fire, and he instantly comes across as a despicable dirtbag: watching him protectively pushing his car away from his burning house while his kids are dying inside is… not pleasant, and not conducive to sympathizing with him. (Though the film does not mention this, this was all happening square in the middle of America’s Satanic panic.) Willingham always maintained his innocence. (The script is by Geoffrey Fletcher, Oscar winner for Precious.) In the early 1990s, in rural Texas, Cameron Todd Willingham was accused of murdering his three very young daughters in a house fire that investigators concluded was arson specifically targeting the children Willingham, the only other person in the house at the time, was convicted and sentenced to death based on allegedly scientific evidence as well as his own sketchy past, which included domestic violence, a public perception that the kids were cramping his loser lifestyle, and an affinity for heavy-metal music and its grim trappings. This one is based on true events, and spun off a 2009 New Yorker article by David Grann, which you can read online. Playing on around 100 screens in the US - that’s not tiny, but nowhere near wide, either - is Trial by Fire, an earnest, old-fashioned social-justice drama that focuses on the death penalty from the “what if we execute an innocent person?” angle. ![]() Both are only small releases anyway, and unlikely to make much of a splash. It’s probably only a coincidence that two new movies about capital punishment in America have arrived, one each on either side of the Atlantic. Though maybe it’s only my perception that movies have stepped back from confronting this issue: the death penalty has never really been a major pop-culture concern. As a social-justice cause, putting an end to capital punishment has been a bit backburnered in the Trump era - in pop culture, I mean plenty righteous real-life SJWs have continued to fight the good fight in this regard. That’s… not great company for the supposed (if self-declared) global bastion of freedom and enlightenment. I’m not sure if many Americans realize what an aberration it is that the United States still regularly executes its own citizens. ![]()
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