The Pitch:
Let's condense the Paradise Lost documentaries into a single movie.
This murder and the subsequent trial and appeals
have been well covered, most specifically by the Paradise Lost trilogy
of documentaries. Those movies are imperfect yet fascinating artifacts. They
check in on the story over 15 years, and thanks to the breadth of the time
commitment, even the missteps (part 2, in particular) are still informative.
West of Memphis came out after all three of those docs and repackages
the same story in a single, more polished 2h30m documentary. It's edited with
the benefit of hindsight. For anyone unfamiliar with the case, it's a fine
overview of it all.
There's something about West of Memphis I
just don't like though.
For one, it sure feels like a lot of famous people
patting each other on the back for helping. Thanks to Paradise Lost,
this case got a lot of attention from a long of celebrities. Eddie Vedder put
in a lot of time on this. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh apparently did too as
well as several others. A lot of money was spent to research the case and try
to prove that the West Memphis Three were innocent. It's only fair that those
people get credit for how they helped, but too often West of Memphis
feels like it's about the famous people who helped rather than the case itself,
the wrongly convicted men, or the boys who were killed.
Another part that bothered me is how it felt like Paradise
Lost was only brought up to show what was wrong with it. West of Memphis
has a tricky position. It's covering the same topic. It's essentially forced to
acknowledge the Paradise Lost series. But, to justify its own existence,
West of Memphis ends up pointing out what Paradise Lost got wrong
or incomplete. My favorite documentaries have a sense of discovery to them, and
this lacks anything like that. West of Memphis fairly passionately
covers all the information already in Paradise Lost, then perks up when
it gets a celebrity interview or has a chance to cover some lesser known facet
of the investigation.
So, Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three is
a credited producer on this. The other two men are not. That makes a lot of
sense because this documentary straight up forgets them most of the time. The
majority of the interviews are about Damien Echols. I think he was maybe the
only one actually on death row, so his situation was more urgent. Or maybe the
other two weren't as interested in interviews. It's just not very clear how the
movie picked its targets. The majority of the movie is a phone interview with
Damien Echols followed by an interview with his wife followed by pictures of
Echols in jail followed by Eddie Vedder at a concert reading a letter Echols
wrote. I'm happy to watch a documentary with a focus on Echols, but this is
supposedly about all three or the case as a whole.
That is really what I had trouble with. There's
isn't a clear focus in West of Memphis. It tries to cover too much,
which leaves it all feeling under served and imbalanced. All that said, I'd be
more forgiving had I not already seen the Paradise Lost movies or read
up on it all on my own.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment