It's amazing to think about how Errol Morris' highly stylized doc The Thin Blue Line could be powerful enough to help lead to the exoneration of wrongly imprisoned Randall Adams. There's no verite footage recording what actually happened the night that the officer was killed, and also within the structure of the film, there's not really a definitive flashback to illustrate the truth. Instead, the film is punctuated at the end with the audio recording of David Harris essentially confessing the truth to Morris.
The structure of the film is effective, where in the beginning there is a sense of the truth being out of focus, leaving one to think who's really guilty?, or did they both have a hand in the crime? Over the course of the film, through the Rashomon-esque flashbacks of the crime coming from more subjects that took part in this story, the picture gets a little bit sharper, and by the end the viewer is left satisfied because it's apparent that Harris was the truly guilty one.
As far as the style of the film, the noir look for the flashbacks and the eerie Phillip Glass score add a little bit of Hollywood to the mix, and in contrary to the beliefs of the cinema verite crowd, it never feels like the truth has been fabricated in this documentary, rather it feels like it's been constructed through creativity. There is more than just a stylistic difference between verite and an investigative documentary like The Thin Blue Line. Verite captures the here and now and leaves it open for people to observe what it was like be at a certain event. Morris' film has the advantage of looking at things in retrospect, and in doing so, creates a multi-layered documentary. Not only is it about how Randall Adams was framed by David Harris, but it's also an indictment of the flawed Texas justice system, and also a tale of how a traumatized three-year-old could potentially be turned into a life long criminal.
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1 comment:
Interesting to know.
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