Cry For The Camera.

Rating: 6/10 (7 June 2015)

Ben Affleck is apparently a happily married man who returns home one afternoon to find the living room is a mess, there are blood spots on the wall, and his wife, Rosamund Pike, is gone. The police force of the small Indiana town investigate and find that the kidnapping was staged. Their suspicions naturally fall on the husband and he is battered in the news. Everyone wants a quick solution.
The suspicions are heightened when the wife's half-burned diary shows entries indicating that the marriage was failing and that she was scared to death her husband was going to kill her. Affleck is charged, hires a media-savvy lawyer.
The case has become one of those nationwide incidents like O. J. Simpson's, in which everyone follows events daily and has made judgments about Affleck's guilt -- all to the effect that he murdered his wife, of course. The TV cameras have been rolling throughout and the reporters are an unruly horde. Affleck's personality is dissected by a Nancy-Grace figure on television. The audience is especially gleeful when Affleck reveals that he has been schtupping one of his students at the community college where he teaches.
It's absolutely sensational (but a little confusing to the media's narrative) when his wife finally returns, bloodied but not unbowed, claiming she really WAS kidnapped, abused, and had to kill her abductor to free herself. She's dressed only in a blood-soaked nightgown and she collapses in her husband's arms on the lawn, while the cameras roll and everyone gasps with delight.
Well, the whole plot is really too complicated to explain. It's a somber story and nobody emerges guilt free. On the audio commentary, the director seems self confident, maybe too much so. ("F*** you," he announces to some of his critics.) But it's a useful commentary because you learn what the director was getting at, even if it doesn't come across vividly on the screen.
The gap is understandable. The director, like the writer, knows what's going on because, after all, he's READ THE SCRIPT and knows how it will all turn out. But the catch is that, knowing all this, the director is liable to project his knowledge and assume that the audience is more sophisticated than it actually is. In other words, the "hints" and forshadowings are minimal and don't get past the viewer's apperceptive apparatus. Dave -- we're stupid.
The film focuses on the malleable and naive Affleck and the manipulative and morally bankrupt Pike. Marriage is like a deck of cards. In the beginning all you need is two hearts and a diamond. By the end you wish you had a club and a spade. Affleck seems honestly in love, while Pike is manipulative. As Jorge Luis Borges said, "To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
But I'd prefer to read it as a comment on the media. Here is a complex, small-scale, interpersonal event and the media turn it into a morality play that reverses the roles of victims and the perpetrator. Pike, the murderess, becomes the abused heroine of the tale. Affleck, the simple minded dupe, has revealed all of his weaknesses and peccadilloes in television interviews.
Well, as any member of the viewing audience will tell you, he doesn't deserve a wonderful woman like Pike. The audience doesn't even have to think about the moral calculus. It's given to them by the price of a TV dish.
The reason I see this as perhaps the most important "message" of the film is that it's happening now, every day, and not just with regard to such personal transgressions and murder and sexual abuse but to issues of fundamental import, like politics. Led on by television, our opinions precede the analysis. I'm for a "strong" dollar. And why? No TV personality has ever told me I shouldn't. I like the word "strong" when it applies to anything American. Please don't confuse me with a lot of complicated junk about imports and exports. If it's "American" it's got to be "strong."
I'll give away a part of the ending. Except for the fact that Affleck and Pike will now probably become rich as a consequence of the TV movie and the books, nothing much changes.