We Need A Good Courtroom Movie Drama, With All Those Hard Lessons About ‘Truth’
deadline.comWe desperately need a good courtroom drama.Not the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard kind, where everyone’s a mess, and the outcome matters less than the spectacle.But rather, an old-fashioned, high-stakes, plot-heavy movie melodrama—the kind that makes the audience see-saw back and forth, while truth hangs in an ever-changing balance.
First things lean one way, then the other. A single stray fact reverses the entire narrative. Sometimes when the verdict comes in, the winner is actually a bad guy, though we only find out later, as in, say, Anatomy Of A Murder.Once a box-office staple, legal dramas of that sort—12 Angry Men, A Few Good Men, The Verdict, Suspect, and any number of films you’ve watched on TCM—were great entertainment.
But, much more, they taught a recurring lesson about the dark and slippery nature of reality. Things are seldom what they first seem.
Under meticulous scrutiny, the “facts” tend to wobble as testimony piles up, motives are revealed, evidence is tested.This is something even good reporters learn the hard way–we’ve all had stories that were obvious, until suddenly they weren’t.
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