Cinema Canada (Jul-Aug 1975)

miscarriages of judicial process, not to mention the enormity of condemning a 14-year-old to execution, the Pearson supreme court, and Pearson himself, refused to re-open the case. Truscott, who is widely thought to have been innocent, served ten years. With a peculiar shiver we realize that sooner or later Recommendation for Mercy is going to be shown to a theatre audience with Steven Truscott in its midst. Presumably, too, the family of the murdered girl and of Truscott, many of the witnesses at the trial, the police investigators, the lawyers for prosecution and defence, and the jury who found the boy guilty, may go to see the film. It may be, also, that there is one other man who will watch the recreation of those events with a more than ordinary interest in how accurately they are portrayed. Undertaking to reconstruct a story of this kind confronts the writer-director with momentous problems of selection and point of view. What is essentially important about these events? What needs to be communicated about them? How shall the public be confronted with them and made to encounter their implications? Involved with these questions are critical problems of dramatic method. How do you tell a story at whose crucial centre there is an event of which you are ignorant? You can tell the events of which you are reasonably sure, and for which there is corroborating testimony, and then . say: ‘‘Beyond this point, either this happened, or this, or this, or something else altogether.’’ When, as in this case, a determination of what took place led directly to the selection of somebody to punish for it, the problem becomes critical. Markowitz is rightly concerned with questions about the manipulation of evidence and the desire of an enraged community to find a convenient scapegoat. Even if he was guilty, the boy ‘“‘John Robinson”’ was convicted by a pretty haphazard proceeding. While he makes a commendable effort to establish the trial in the social milieu that bore so heavily upon its outcome, Markowitz has perhaps opted too strongly for the did-he-or-didn’t-he fascination of that brutal event. In an attempt to be dramatically intriguing (a la Conversation), the film goes far beyond the issue of how the court dealt with what was presented as evidence. Markowitz wants to draw us into the emotional turmoil and bewilderment which he presumes were inflicted on the boy by his imprisonment and interrogation. (The 24 anxious hours that Markowitz himself spent in jail on arape charge have furnished him with the knowledge of how the most innocent mind can get spooked into acrazy loss of bearings.) In pursuit of this dramatic mystification, Markowitz shows us images whose reality-status is left deliberately obscure. To take the crucial instance: among several versions of the rape-murder we are shown one version in which John Robinson is the killer. The structural position of this scene prompts us to assume that it is John’s own recollection of the event (if he is guilty), or his confused fantasy (if he is innocent). But if it is a recollection, then it should be properly be seen from his point of view, instead of in the form of brief flashes from a third-person camera position. And if it is a fantasy, then it should not conform in its details to the exact place and condition in which the body was shown to have been found because John could not have known those details. In other words, a version of the event which Markowitz intends to be receivable as either recollection or fantasy, can in fact be neither. It could be a juryman’s visual conjecture, but that is not the way in which it is planted. Thus the film’s format has moved from showing how the objective reality of the event cannot be conclusively proven, to the point of suggesting that the event actually had no objective reality. The director is not, I think, altogether responsible for this shift. It results from an intrinsic tendency of cinema to con 48 Cinema Canada fer the status of objective reality on whatever it clearly shows (unless positive signs are given that the event is to be taken as dream, fantasy etc.). Very early in the film we see John Robinson fall from his bicycle, in such a way as to receive the injuries that the police doctor argues were incurred during the sexual assault. There may be some doubt in the minds of the jury, but there can be none in ours. We saw him fall and clutch at his groin and cry in pain. Now, ina court of law, two conflicting verbal accounts of an event may cause us to doubt the veracity ofthe tellers; we may no longer believe what we have been to/d. But the film has shown us an event taking place. We may easily accept that other people, who were not there, can refuse to believe it; but we have seen it — it did take place. If the film then tries to undermine our certainty by showing us another version of the event, the effect is to suggest that both versions are real, and that therefore nothing, or anything, happened during those critical minutes. Or else someone is fooling with us. Markowitz has spoken in an interview (with Natalie Edwards, Cinema Canada #19) about his own problems with reality — how things are real and unreal at the same time. He is prepared to endorse the ‘‘surreal’’ dimension of Recommendation for Mercy. Insofar as he seeks to convey the private horror of John’s ordeal, the technique is defensible, although it threatens to deflect from the social drama of the story, which I would judge to be more significant. And in fact the most powerful scenes of John’s suffering are those of remorseless interrogation, which depart from objectivity only to the extent of a distorting intensification of vision and sound. Such scenes make it clear that we don’t need to be shown an arbitrarily selected version of John’s inner experience. We can feel from his behaviour (in the beautiful performance by Andrew Skidd) the full shock of his disorientation. Our capacity to feel what he is going through is not intensified but actually limited by the injection of synthesized subjective flashes. But if Markowitz is going further and allowing the notion to prevail (in the Pirandello—Durrell—Rashomon vein) that there is no objective reality, only an array of subjectivities, then he is playing a pseudo-philosophical game of almost criminal irresponsibility. It’s all very well for frivolous literati to wonder if yesterday ever happened. But if Truscott was innocent, it will be small consolation to him to be told that, philosophically, it’s alla matter of how you look at it! For the most part, Markowitz is not toying with his subject, but channeling his strong feelings about it into an indignant and compelling drama. The strength of the screenplay resides in its depiction of stupid authorities,lying and hypocritical witnesses, disgraceful judicial practices, and the overwhelming presumption of the helpless boy’s guilt. The power of the situation has elicited immediate and most believable performances from some of the actors, especially John’s two friends (Rob Judd, Mike Upmalis), his father (James Millington), and the two investigating police officers. To an extent that is rare in Canadian films, and which involves the expense and difficulty of handling a large cast, Markowitz has created a complex society around the central action. In the teenage demi-monde, through which John moves with troubled innocence, pent-up adolescent sexuality generates a restless violence. Among the adults, bigotry and shortsightedness and indifference prevail. If Canadian cinema is viable at all at present, a film like Recommendation for Mercy, while it violates its own codes sometimes, is the right kind of film to be making. Its dramatic potency comes from having something urgent to say and to show about Canadian society. The film cries out to its audience *‘For God’s sake, something very like this actually happened, and could happen again.’’ Recommendation for Mercy doesn’t offer to entertain —turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream — but to arouse and appal.