I don't know why this docudrama isn't more successful than it is. The issue it deals with is important enough. Maybe that's part of the problem. When you treat a tragedy with substandard techniques it cheapens the subject matter.
The difficult, I think, lies mainly in the script. It gives us all the clichés of victimization stories. Innocent people are herded up by the police without warning, shuffled off to the slams to be humiliated, accused by lunatics of nefarious actions, and suffer immensely. The survivors in the end forgive God but not people.
Well, basically, that's what happened. But the performances amount to no more than professionalism. And who could make believable such lines as, "This trial is about justice." And, "This is a system of laws and I happen to believe in it." The DA isn't given more than one dimension. James Woods is his usual manic and cocky self, and changes from cynical to committed halfway through the trial without any noticeable motivation, but at least that mania fits the role. Shirley Knight gives a first-rate impersonation of Shirley Schrift.
Lolita Davidovich's character is at least treated with some respect, although she's clearly one of the engines behind this terrible miscarriage of justice. As Woods points out, he doesn't believe she lied. He believes her motives are good but she is mistaken. She used dolls as surrogate people to draw the stories out of the kids she interviewed. In one instance she used a black doll to represent the guy they were trying to hang the molestation charges on. When asked if this was racism, Davidovich says she doesn't associate a doll's skin color with racism. SHE may not, but kids did, at least in the 1950s when the distinguished educator Kenneth Clark and his wife carried out their experiments linking the skin color of dolls to self valuation. (The studies influenced the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.)
Yet the subject is so important that it should be seen if only for its educational content. The movie itself is an "indictment" of television, which is held responsible for the mass hysteria that swept the country at the time. (A very good TV documentary was done on a similar case in Eden, North Carolina.) Well, TV is an easy target. "World's Wildest Police Chases" and all that.
But -- to face one or two unpleasant facts -- the witch hunt of 1693 in Salem, Massachussetts, resulted in the deaths of more than 20 people, and this was considerably BEFORE radio talk shows and Geraldo Rivera. There is something in the reptilian part of the human brain that seems to enjoy the suffering of others, no matter how innocent they are. And in this instance the children only provided a conduit for that Schadenfreude. The kids were a "delivery system", as it were, for the willing hatred felt towards those in no position to hit back. It's a dark prospect that the film doesn't dream of addressing.
These waves of mass hysteria seem to come and go. Not just witches and preschool pedophiles but Paul McCartney is dead, there are worms in the McDonald's hamburgers, Satanists behind closed doors, conspiracies between internet predators, Satanic symbols in the Proctor & Gamble logo, figures in kid's TV cartoons who wear lavender clothes as a signal to the gay audience, speckled windshields in Seattle, phantom gassers in Matoon, Illinois. Some are damaging but silly. Others are far more dangerous: a horde of unaccounted for MIAs held captive in North Vietnam, and international conspiracy of Jews, a country taken over by a Kenyan-born communist president. And for too many of us, nothing seems able to shake our confidence in these mass delusions.
If we haven't GOT any enemies we'll invent them. Maybe because we need bad examples in order to perceive ourselves as virtuous.
Anyway, for all its weaknesses, the movie is definitely worth catching. The next epidemic of hysteria is right around the corner.
The difficult, I think, lies mainly in the script. It gives us all the clichés of victimization stories. Innocent people are herded up by the police without warning, shuffled off to the slams to be humiliated, accused by lunatics of nefarious actions, and suffer immensely. The survivors in the end forgive God but not people.
Well, basically, that's what happened. But the performances amount to no more than professionalism. And who could make believable such lines as, "This trial is about justice." And, "This is a system of laws and I happen to believe in it." The DA isn't given more than one dimension. James Woods is his usual manic and cocky self, and changes from cynical to committed halfway through the trial without any noticeable motivation, but at least that mania fits the role. Shirley Knight gives a first-rate impersonation of Shirley Schrift.
Lolita Davidovich's character is at least treated with some respect, although she's clearly one of the engines behind this terrible miscarriage of justice. As Woods points out, he doesn't believe she lied. He believes her motives are good but she is mistaken. She used dolls as surrogate people to draw the stories out of the kids she interviewed. In one instance she used a black doll to represent the guy they were trying to hang the molestation charges on. When asked if this was racism, Davidovich says she doesn't associate a doll's skin color with racism. SHE may not, but kids did, at least in the 1950s when the distinguished educator Kenneth Clark and his wife carried out their experiments linking the skin color of dolls to self valuation. (The studies influenced the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.)
Yet the subject is so important that it should be seen if only for its educational content. The movie itself is an "indictment" of television, which is held responsible for the mass hysteria that swept the country at the time. (A very good TV documentary was done on a similar case in Eden, North Carolina.) Well, TV is an easy target. "World's Wildest Police Chases" and all that.
But -- to face one or two unpleasant facts -- the witch hunt of 1693 in Salem, Massachussetts, resulted in the deaths of more than 20 people, and this was considerably BEFORE radio talk shows and Geraldo Rivera. There is something in the reptilian part of the human brain that seems to enjoy the suffering of others, no matter how innocent they are. And in this instance the children only provided a conduit for that Schadenfreude. The kids were a "delivery system", as it were, for the willing hatred felt towards those in no position to hit back. It's a dark prospect that the film doesn't dream of addressing.
These waves of mass hysteria seem to come and go. Not just witches and preschool pedophiles but Paul McCartney is dead, there are worms in the McDonald's hamburgers, Satanists behind closed doors, conspiracies between internet predators, Satanic symbols in the Proctor & Gamble logo, figures in kid's TV cartoons who wear lavender clothes as a signal to the gay audience, speckled windshields in Seattle, phantom gassers in Matoon, Illinois. Some are damaging but silly. Others are far more dangerous: a horde of unaccounted for MIAs held captive in North Vietnam, and international conspiracy of Jews, a country taken over by a Kenyan-born communist president. And for too many of us, nothing seems able to shake our confidence in these mass delusions.
If we haven't GOT any enemies we'll invent them. Maybe because we need bad examples in order to perceive ourselves as virtuous.
Anyway, for all its weaknesses, the movie is definitely worth catching. The next epidemic of hysteria is right around the corner.