Trial By Fire is one of the rare times that I read The New Yorker article before watching the movie. It is about Cameron Todd Willingham, a man convicted for allegedly murdering his children by committing arson, but scientific evidence later showed that the expert testimony lacked objective expertise and was more similar to the testimony levelled at the Memphis Four. Was he incorrectly convicted and actually innocent?
I decided not to see Trial By Fire in theaters, but if a movie is based on a true story, I lean towards watching it at home because I correctly predicted that mom would be interested in watching it. Edward Zwick directed it. While Zwick has made many classics such as Glory and Courage Under Fire and some solid entertaining movies such Defiance, Legends of the Fall, he has also made some horrible movies such as Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and The Last Samurai. It seems as if Zwick’s vision has not been aging like a fine wine.
In spite of Zwick’s downward trajectory, I was still willing to watch Trial By Fire because of the cast. I really slept on Laura Dern’s excellence as a human being and actor, but I am awake now. I did not recognize that Jack O’Connell, who played the wrongly accused father and protagonist because O’Connell is a chameleon. You will not detect that he is actually from across the pond. Unfortunately O’Connell still has not found the right movie to showcase his talents. His movies are solid, but not memorably superb or classics. I love Unbroken the book, but the movie is lacking in comparison. ’71 is a good film, but it feels like the fiction that it is. Seberg is a misguided film. He never disappoints and becomes his character, but he deserves better films.
Trial By Fire feels like two movies in one. It has a run time of two hours seven minutes, but it takes forty-eight minutes for the movie to introduce Dern’s character, Elizabeth Gilbert, and for the film to build up momentum. It felt as if the filmmakers wanted the audience to see and distrust the protagonist in the same way that the accused’s community saw him then gradually shift our perspective to sympathize with him. It is puzzling why the writers took that route since the viewer will not relate to those who condemn Willingham either. There is a lot of exploitation of regional and class bias in the first third of the film whereas Manchester by the Sea already set the tracks for how to introduce a similar character. We do not have to like him. We should have questions about him so instead of starting with the crime—and I am not advocating for the narrative using the How We Got Here trope, the film should have started far earlier than the crime or cut everything that came before the introduction of Dern’s character and make her the protagonist.
Trial By Fire has some neat fragments showing how Willingham’s character improved with suffering, but largely missed opportunities to truly examine the textured complexity that a man who initially seemed devoid of any admirable qualities could contain a better person. I did enjoy that he never quite abandons his sleaze side, which is why Dern’s gentle rebuke without abandonment makes the pair more interesting to watch than Willingham as a focal point. He changes depending on his company and environment throughout the film, and the film implies that if life had happy endings, but Willingham could not escape his neighborhood, he would return to his irreputable roots. The first part is just a variety of horrible people and dead children, which no one wants to watch. If the film did not examine Willingham at arm’s length as a subject to study instead of a person whom they wanted audiences to relate to, he did not have to be a saint to deserve that treatment. The best characters are often unlikeable.
In spite of its flagging start, there are a handful of impressive, quotable moments in Trial By Fire. There is plenty of tragedy and injustice in the film, but it does a deliriously electric job of evoking the communion of saints, a timeless realm of truth that can exist in the presence of two or more people who can see and speak it into existence even if those people would not normally share any other space under different circumstances. Dern, O’Connell and the filmmakers manage to briefly create holy ground without any heavy-handed, overt preaching. Gilbert admonishes, “So life isn’t fair. What are we gonna do with that? Maybe this right now is the best we get. Us being here for each other knowing how wrong it is. Maybe this is the God part.”
Trial By Fire works as a film about Gilbert, an ordinary woman with a ministry without going to seminary or divinity school, without a congregation or even proselytizing. She quietly decides to take action, and it seems like a study of watching a person escalate acts of kindness. She starts closer to home then graduates to death row. She is an admirable woman for looking beyond her privilege and trying to find her way to make the world a better place with many levels of sacrifice, intentional and not. She angers and puzzles her kids. She is a lady who lunches without judging others around her for not doing more. She just has her singular mission of being there for dying men without obligation or duty. She is an accessible picture and cautionary tale of how to do more even if you feel as if you are powerless.
Trial By Fire tried to have a visually distinct way of telling Willingham’s story. The letters are illustrated by inserting Willingham into Gilbert’s daily life. There is also a dash of sober magical realism that was intriguing, but inconsistent; however because it was not the usual American disaster that results from trying to copy Spanish filmmakers ability to combine the fantastic with the quotidian, I will give points to the filmmakers for trying and not making me cringe. I wish that I knew whether or not the promise that Gilbert made to Willingham actually happened because it felt so clearly foreboding that it felt like ridiculous fiction.
Unlike the article, Trial By Fire only focuses on Willingham and never pulls back focus to show other people who were in a similar predicament, convicted on faulty testimony. It may have helped to further contextualize the situation since the filmmakers did not succeed at making a real protagonist. The actual logistics of the trial did become interesting when Jeff Perry appears as the real expert. I love Perry, who played Cyrus on Scandal, and I would have been happy for him to get more screen time though it would have been a departure from the heart that Dern brought to the film.
Trial By Fire was an uneven film. It never really could decide if it cared more about the logistics of injustice or the endurance of the human spirit during suffering. The latter was stronger and makes the film worth watching, but it is quite a slog to get there so consider yourself warned.