What would you do if your wife was arrested for a murder she didn’t commit and was sentenced to life imprisonment? How far would you go to get her out once you had exhausted all legal means?
How much would the fact that she had attempted suicide in despair figure into your plans?
At first sight, The Next Three Days may come across as just another thriller/car chase. The premise is well put together, and credible, so even if you just watch it as escape, it makes good entertainment.
But, seriously. What would you do? Would you raise your young son alone as a single father and write her off? Would you take steps so drastic that if your wife found out about them she might not love you anymore? Would you go out of your mind?
Reading movie reviews of The Next Three Days, I came across one that I can’t shake. No amount of injustice, this reviewer stated, justifies breaking the law and becoming violent against people who oppose you. Well yes. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Everybody knows that. Any Sunday School teacher can tell you that.
The moral philosopher Lawrence Kohlberg produced a theory of moral development that is widely shared and part of any serious course in ethics. People grow morally, Kohlberg assumed, the same way they grow cognitively. They move up through six levels of growth from Level 1, the infantile “me-me’ stage, through the mid-level stages, where you make decisions as a member of society, to the most advanced stage, where you are guided by the highest moral principle - following the law because it’s the law, a way of restating the assumption that all of us rise or fall to the degree we are able to sacrifice our individual desires for the well-being of us all. To do otherwise is to invite chaos and disorder and permanent insecurity.
Russell Crowe plays John Brennan, a man whose wife is accused of murdering her boss, is tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to life in prison. Brennan knows his wife is incapable of such behavior and makes it his life’s mission to get her out when her lawyer tells him there is no hope of a reprieve or of gathering further evidence that would exonerate her. He’s up against a blank wall, and soon runs out of options, having begged and borrowed everything he can. He is facing an absolutely unsolvable moral dilemma.
Brennan finds his way to Damon, a man who has succeeded in escaping prison seven times. Damon (played by Liam Neeson) gives him some advice. “Don’t worry about how to escape - that’s the easy part. You just wait for the opportunity; it will come along. The hard part begins then. You’ve got to plan what you’re going to do afterward, down to the last detail. Where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there. And you’re going to have to decide what your priorities are: can you kill, if you have to? And you’ll need some good luck.”
In one sense, this should have been a boringly predictable movie. The advice sets up expectations. It’s like Chekhov said, “If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you have to use it by the third.” We are primed for John to spring his wife and make a clean getaway. And this outlines the course of the movie. The thrill is all in the close calls and the film doesn’t disappoint. I went to bed thinking, “Well, that was pretty good escape material.”
But when I woke up, I realized I had spent the night playing the story over and over again in my dreams. Something was resonating that I had not expected. The fact that the film is a genuine moral dilemma makes it a cut above a simple thriller. It invites you to speculate about what you would do if the world failed you so completely. If the justice system got things so spectacularly wrong. If your friends and neighbors all gave up on you. If your wife went so far as to tell you she actually committed the murder, not because she did, but because she loves you and wants you to move on with your life.
I had a Venezuelan friend look me up after many years. She had left Venezuela when Hugo Chavez took over and gone to Miami, where she had married a Cuban refugee. Both of them lived with a white-hot hatred of Chavez and Castro for tearing their countries apart. We realized early on in our reunion that we would not be able to maintain an ongoing relationship. They had thrown in their lot with the American right-wingers because they saw them as tougher on communism. I found myself thinking at some point, “But there are more important issues than fighting communism - there’s gun control, the destruction of the climate, the gap between the rich and the poor in America.” I had found another example of irreconcilable differences to supplement the one I already had to deal with, the fact that loving members of my family were Trump supporters because he was more likely than any democrat to oppose abortion, their single overriding issue.
When you come up against this kind of dedication to a cause - communism, anti-abortion sentiment, or any other issue people fight passionately for - you know that reasoning is not likely to make a difference. You can only hope your side outnumbers the other side and that action can follow the rule of the majority.
Perhaps it’s because we are living with this kind of polarization these days, and possibly it’s because I came face-to-face with the inability to reason with an opponent back in the day when I was fighting for the right of lesbians and gays to marry. I realized there was no shortcut but to try to get in the shoes of my opponents and deal with their fears and insecurities, to respect their value system and try to find common ground.
Kohlberg’s moral theory is not without its critics. One of these, Carol Gilligan, takes a feminist perspective, sees claims of certainty about moral principles as a masculine trait and argues that justice must co-exist with mercy, that forgiveness and understanding of values formed on the basis of life experience must be taken into consideration when deciding what is right.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, I found myself worrying that we would now have to face gloating on the part of right-wingers that would temper the joy I naturally felt after living so close to the cruelty of division in Berlin, for a time, the place I had determined to make my home. Serious mixed feelings, and the 90% joy did not erase the 10% regret. Who would speak now for all the victims of vulture capitalism, for the countless people living in the streets of American cities? Who would keep the dream of social equity alive? Certainly not organized American Christianity, where the rule was “Let the children come unto me -- unless they’re Mexicans.”
I’m not going to resolve this issue of how to balance justice and mercy or respond adequately to the moral dilemma of whether to sacrifice self and family for the greater good of the larger society. I just brought it up because The Next Three Days sent me spinning in circles with these thoughts.
And that makes the story, at least for me, much more than a simple thriller. What is theater, after all, but a venue for getting your thinking going on things that really matter?
photo credit
The Next Three Days was originally produced in 2010, where it had only modest success at the box office and mixed reviews. Fortunately, Netflix thought it was worth adding to their offerings.
No comments:
Post a Comment