The Interrupters (2011)
***/****
directed by Steve James
by Angelo Muredda There’s a bracing moment late in Steve James’s new documentary The Interrupters when a host of Chicago neighbourhood teens pay their respects to Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old beaten to death in a gang skirmish outside his school. Fidgeting in their pews and adjusting their hats (for the camera?) at his memorial service, they take in their surroundings as if, as one commentator opines, they’re at a dress rehearsal for their own funerals. The Interrupters is full of such alarming insights. A fly-on-the-wall chronicle of a year in the life of three so-called violence interrupters, it puts us on the frontlines of a number of intense encounters on Chicago streets without losing sight of the generational crisis that undergirds each of these potentially shattering exchanges between kids who don’t expect to live past 30. Both James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, whose NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE article on the violence-prevention efforts of an organization called CeaseFire inspired the film, ensure that the stakes are high; the camera frequently catches ephemeral stuffed-animal memorials, charting a haunted path through marked playgrounds and bus stops. If the filmmakers’ subdued reverence for their protagonists sometimes keeps them from fully exploring their complex subject, the result is nevertheless a devastating polemic about retraining fatalistic teens to think of themselves as having a future.
On August 19 of this year, the West Memphis Three–the no-longer-young men railroaded in a triple homicide that left a humble Arkansas town mobbishly seeking justice–were finally released from prison, making Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premiered at the TIFF on September 11, instantly obsolete. (The film reveals their parole in a postscript that feels laughably abrupt after 100 minutes of handwringing.) Where 1996’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills dealt with the role of religious paranoia in the scapegoating of the West Memphis Three (who were accused of killing a trio of boys as part of a Satanic ritual) and its 1999 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was profoundly if not explicitly about the ineffectuality of the original as an agent of change, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is mostly a lot of housekeeping, a refresher course for viewers of the first two films and a lint trap for details about the case that have emerged in the media over the past decade. More a glorified DVD supplement than a documentary, the picture’s at its best when it shows how easy it is to work up a head of righteous anger for dead kids by framing one of the fathers of the victims, Mark Byers, as the killer with “evidence” no less flimsily circumstantial than that which was used to condemn the West Memphis Three. (He had priors, his son’s death didn’t curb his criminal lifestyle–he must have done it!) In fact, Byers is compelled by his moment on the other side of the torch-wielding villagers to write a letter of apology to Damien Echols, the only one of the West Memphis Three on Death Row, whose head he called for back in ’93. But by the end of the piece, another of the fathers, Terry Hobbs, has implicated himself in the killings by virtue of suing the Dixie Chicks‘ Natalie Maines for slander, and Byers hastily commits to this new version of events, drafting a giant pros-and-cons list that seals Hobbs’s guilt in his eyes. Hobbs may well be the culprit (the DNA does not work in his favour), but the point is, eighteen years later, nobody has learned to let nature take its course–except the Zen-patient West Memphis Three.
When Cameron Crowe’s
by Bryant Frazer
by Jefferson Robbins