Primal fear - 1996

 It’s a good movie. A very bitter legal drama, with an equal talk of psychology as well as laws, and a twisted end. There’s some hint at money intrigue in it, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

The part about the past relationship about the two attorneys was totally irrelevant and useless, it meant nothing to the story and changed nothing, it was simply a waste of time and also annoying.

The actors were all good. I’m not a big fan of Richard Gere when there’s great depth involved in the character; he did okay but it could have been better. Laura Linney did good with the cards given to her but I’m not sure how this Janet is supposed to be. The character of Janet was not really developed as it should have been. They say she went out with Martin for six months before they split, but it’s not clear why they split, or why she’s so bitter while he keeps trying to get close again. She says about their story that “it was a one-night stand, it just lasted six months” which is a good line, but there’s no more explanation.

She seems to try too hard to be tough, totally stressed out and a little lost in life.

Edward Norton was really good, it was a good character to play, it must be really ‘fun’ for an actor to play a character like this, I’d love that.

Alfre Woodard, well, always a pleasure.

Details:

We’re in Chicago.

Martin Vail is a defence attorney who loves the spotlight, the fame, the money, being on magazine’s covers and all that.

When all the tv channels break the news about archbishop Rushman’s brutal murder, and the chase of suspect murderer Aaron Stapler, he immediately offers to defend him pro bono. I guess because a story like that would be front page news every day.

Janet is charged with the prosecution, and she is ordered to aim for the death penalty.

Martin doesn’t come out as an idealist, he gives interviews saying he believes in the “illusion of truth, what he makes the jury believe”, that he doesn’t care who the person is, he simply does his job, not caring at all if they did or did not do what they were accused of, but then he meets altar boy Aaron, stuttering boy from Kentucky, only nineteen but already with a sad past and a difficult life, who appears to him to be a poor little boyscout, and he believes in his innocent and so he fights to save him from death. Aaron has nothing, really, to say in his defence. He says he blacked out, he doesn’t remember, he got scared… and Martin does what he can: he arranges a psychological evaluation of him while the trial goes on. He tries to suggest there might have been a third person there, simply because to give someone the death penalty there must be no doubt at all so he wants to make the jury doubt, but half way through something comes up.

Another altar boy reveals that there is a tape, a videotape, in the archbishop’s possession, and Martin discovers that the man used to film the two boys having sex with a girl.

It did look like, before, like it might have been all a money matter, but now this video shows that the archbishop was not the saint everyone seemed to think (nobody is a saint, people, nobody).

Also, it gives Aaron a motive. Martin confronts him thinking he lied to him, but this is when Roy comes out. When Martin presses Aaron too much, he’s so stressed and cornered that he can’t take it, so Roy comes out, and Roy’s personality is the total opposite, he’s confident and aggressive, and clearly admits that he killed the man because Aaron was not strong enough.

He cannot change his line of defence this far in the trial, so he plays it desperately from other angles but trying to get there anyway.

He has the doctor talk of Aaron’s personality disorder, then he has Janet grill Aaron on the stand until Roy comes out and tries to hurt her and escape but of course is stopped.

The judge now decides that she’ll send the jury home and she herself will give a verdict of insanity, so Aaron will have to stay in a hospital for a month to be evaluated… (then what? home?)

Anyway, at this point Janet has lost her job and made enemies, Martin has made enemies also, but Aaron is safe…

and here comes the twisted ending:

Martin goes to tell Aaron the good news, and sweet innocent Aaron seems really relieved and everything, but then he makes a mistake (does he really?) and says something that only his other personality Roy ought to know, so Martin comes back to him and now Roy tells him how he wanted to tell him, that he had fun all along, that they were a good team at the trial and so on… Martin is shocked that Aaron faked the blackouts, that he remembered everything all along, and asks him if it was all a lie, if ‘there never was a Roy’, to which he gets shocked again when the reply is that ‘there never was an Aaron’.

Martin goes out immediately, feeling very very low.

Now, this probably means that the whole insanity thing was just a ruse to avoid the death penalty, that since he had nothing else to save him he came up with this, and the last line means that while he is in fact alone in that head of his, his true personality is not the poor innocent one but the aggressive, murderous one, and he fooled everyone and got away with two murders (he confessed at the end there that he also killed the girl Linda).

I’m pretty sure that is how they see it, and that is why Martin looked like that, completely fooled and bitter. He said earlier that he wanted to believe there was goodness in everybody, and this ending kills that.

And yet, there is another way to see this ending, which is the one I thought first actually. 

Because, you see, the disorder made lots of sense here for a boy grown up without a mother, with an abusive father, who ran away alone and lived on the streets begging until he was rescued by the same man that later manipulated him into doing sex videos in front of him…

yeah, these details of his life might not be really true, might be part of his ‘cover’… but if so, then why kill those people? I think it was his true past, and that he really started having a disorder to cope with reality, but then, and here it comes the last line of the movie, reality sucked so much that Aaron gave up and Roy’s much stronger personality took complete charge of the body they shared before… 

still a bitter ending, still a total failure on Martin’s moral viewpoint, still a murderer who got away with it… based on facts, nothing really changes there, no. What changes is the character:

A-if there never was a disorder, it means there is nothing good in the boy, that he is a nineteen year old murderer without remorse, rotten to the core, and that it was all a plan, the best thing he could think of since he failed to escape the police. 

B-if there was a disorder, it means that there once was a poor innocent Aaron but his fucked up reality killed him leaving a murderer in his place.

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