Brother's Keeper feels almost gothic, following the camera as it wends through the filth, clutter, and squalor of the brothers' home to settle on Delbert's gaunt face. It's longer than it needs to be, and the brothers' mumbly, heavily accented speech can be nearly indecipherable at times. The brothers are plenty creepy, but not really in a threatening way (more in a "I wouldn't sit next to him on the bus" way). The prosecutors come off as crazed, just looking for someone to blame, and hysterically escalating the crime when they feel their case slipping away. (There's a hint, too, that a sinister plot is afoot to kick the brothers off their farm so that it can be developed into sprawl housing.)
Paradise Lost is a much more disturbing movie in every way. For one thing, even if Delbert did kill his brother, it was arguably a mercy killing and fairly bloodless. The murders in Paradise Lost, however, are senseless, gruesome, and haunting. In what I think is a serious mistake, Berlinger and Sinofsky opt to show photos of the children's corpses -- repeatedly and without warning. I looked away as quickly as I could each time they came on the screen, but I couldn't help catching a glimpse of the sickening images. Just as, if not more, disturbing was the reaction of the little boys' parents. The parents of two of the boys brag about how Christian and righteous they are, but they describe their sons' mutilation with an attention to the gory details that seems almost reveling. They spew hateful invective; they're repulsively bloodthirsty, describing in pornographic detail how they plan to exact their revenge on the teenagers accused of the murder. It matters not a whit to them that absolutely no evidence incriminates the teenagers; someone's pointed to the teens, and the parents take it as gospel. Yes, I felt horrible for the parents, but they were so disgusting that I took to fast-forwarding through the segments showing the "god fearing" ones. I don't know how I would react if my child were murdered, but I would hope that I would retain some vestiges of humanity. The mother of the third boy also admits that she would like to kill whoever murdered her son, but she doesn't sound gleeful or happy about it -- she's ashamed of feeling that way, she's clearly thought about what it would mean to kill someone, and it's wrenching to her.
The lack of evidence in the trials against the boys is stunning. As in Brother's Keeper, the whole witch hunt is kicked off by the police coercing a confession out of a simple-minded boy who doesn't seem to understand what he's really confessing to. But one of the boys he pegs as the perpetrators, Damien Echols, is weird -- he dresses in black, he's into witchcraft, he listens to bands like Megadeth and Metallica (this is, incidentally, how Sinofsky and Berlinger became acquainted with Metallica and, eight years later, came to make Some Kind of Monster), and he, like, reads books. (The other boy apparently is considered guilty by association with Echols.) It certainly seems like a modern-day Salem -- the narrow-minded, "god-fearing" community lusting for the blood of someone who's different from them -- and there's a nauseating bombshell revelation in the middle of the trial that seems to, at the very least, establish a reasonable doubt. Yet, I have to admit, something about Echols struck me as off. He's clearly very smart and curious, and I wanted to see him as the victim of a witch hunt... but he lies about little things for no apparent reason, and he's got a creepy flatness in his gaze. I know that's not grounds to convict someone of murder, but it certainly muddied the waters.
The documentary is very well done, aside from the unnecessary graphic photos of the mutilated corpses, and it's extremely intense (in fact, if you have kids, I would probably not recommend this one for you). I was very upset after watching it, and my maternal feelings extend no further than kittens and ferrets.
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