A Cry in the Dark
I had an argument about capital punishment with some friends over the weekend, and I wish they could have seen this movie. Of course, I was against the death penalty in principle, but what got me was that a person could be executed on circumstantial evidence. Too many things can go wrong and they do, as “A Cry in the Dark” and another current film called “The Thin Blue Line” show.
“A Cry in the Dark,” which is set in Australia, tells the story of Lindy Chamberlain, a woman who said her baby daughter had been dragged away and killed by one of those wild Australian dogs called dingos. Nobody else saw it happen, and after a couple of weeks people stopped feeling sorry for the parents and started spreading rumors about them.
Did she kill her own baby and blame it on the dog? Things began to mount up against her: A mark on a bit of cloth looked like a bloody handprint. Blood was found sprayed all over the under side of the dash board in their car. A dingo wasn’t big enough to carry away a human baby. And so on.
Finally charges were filed against her; she was found guilty by an Australian jury that apparently believed babies are not carried off by dogs; she was sentenced to life imprisonment; she spent 3 1/2 years behind bars (where she gave birth to another child) before being released; an appeals court quashed her conviction on Sept. 15, 1988, calling it a miscarriage of justice that you may have read about or seen on “60 Minutes.”
Why didn’t Lindy weep for her baby? Why did she maintain even an icy demeanor during press interviews and TV appearances? There’s an implication here that if she’d “behaved herself” with the media, they might not have pursued their investigation so zealously after finally charging her with murder (which indeed seems to have been a possibility only considered after the police couldn’t come up with any other explanation that satisfied them).
Meryl Streep has the unenviable task of trying to make us feel sorry for an unsympathetic character. It appears that Lindy was not given to public emotional outbursts. She kept things inside her. After she was accused of killing her child, rage took over and filled her with such deep bitterness that it showed in her face and voice.
And then there was the matter of Lindy’s and Michael Chamberlain’s (played by Sam Neill) religious beliefs.
They are Seventh day Adventists living in a country where hardly anybody knows anything about their religion except that they’re not supposed to eat meat or go to church on Sunday. While talking about resigning themselves to God’s will, they were being whispered about as having sacrificed their baby in some sort of cult ceremony an idea unthinkable within the context of the Adventist faith. Whatever she had done, Lindy was a religious, emotional and social outsider whose husband happened to be a minister; and once somebody decided that this family deserved what they got because of their strange religion, it was open season on them as far as the media were concerned.
“Evil Angels” takes time to build its case against Lindy and take it apart . The blood under the dashboard turned out to be rust proofing. Dingoes can kill and carry off human babies. And additional physical evidence (the baby’s coat, which was missing when she disappeared) turned up years later and supported Lindy’s story.
Fred Schepisi, who directed and co-wrote the film, has used Australian public opinion as a sort of Greek chorus in the background.
He cuts away to tennis matches, bars, gas stations and dinner parties, where the Australian public tries Lindy and finds her guilty (one hostess finally bans the subject at her dinner table, announcing that this trial is not going to ruin another one of her parties).
Schepisi succeeds in indicting the court of public opinion, and his methodical (but absorbing) examination of the evidence helps us understand the state’s circumstantial case.
Streep has been handed a thankless assignment in the lead. She must show us a woman who deliberately withheld insight into herself. She succeeds, so there are times when we grow frustrated because we don’t know what Lindy is thinking or feeling. We begin to dislike her character and then we know how the Australian public felt. This is an audacious performance by Streep , and a great one.
The bottom line of this movie, I guess , is that when emotions run high enough any court is likely to find just about anything about anybody especially if she belongs to a minority group nobody likes anyway, and is charged with an unspeakable crime among other things too numerous to mention.
Combine that possibility with reasonable doubt based on circumstantial evidence, plus a healthy desire for revenge on somebody else’s part, plus capital punishment: What you get is “Evil Angels,” in which Lindy Chamberlain spends three and a half years in prison for murdering her own baby, but at least she doesn’t get executed.
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