 | Starring: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Jennifer Carpenter (III), Colm Feore Director: Scott Derrickson Format: AC-3 Colour Dolby Dubbed DVD-Video Special Edition Subtitled Widescreen NTSC Released: 20 Dec 2005 Average Rating:  |
Our vantage point in the story is that of Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), a criminal lawyer who has achieved notoriety for successfully defending a murderer. The head of her firm (Colm Feore) dangles a partnership in front of her for taking the case of Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), who has been charged with negligent homicide in the death of Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter). Diagnosed as having epilepsy, the Father convinced Emily that she was a victim of demon possession & got her to stop taking her medication. An exorcism was performed, but it was unsuccessful, & Emily starved to death. Prosecuting the case if Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), a man of faith who believes in facts. Bruner is an agnostic, which makes for an obvious irony as she defends the priest whose only concern is that he be alllowed to testify & tell Emily's story. Towards that end he has refused a plea agreement pushed by the archdiocese.
Emily's story emerges in flashbacks during the trial, which puts the prosecution's case at a disadvantage from our perspective. Thomas' alternative explanations for things like how Emily comes to know so many ancient languages ring hollow compared to what we have seen & heard in the flashbacks. It is key that Thomas is a man of faith, that he is a believer whereas Bruner is not, but when he dismisses Moore's beliefs as archaic superstitions is he merely being a Protestant or is he drawing a line in the theological sand elsewhere? To the point, does he believe in God but not Satan? In both but not in possession? More to the point, when faith & facts collide, why does he obviously side with the latter? These questions matter to me because by focusing on the trial the story here is about what religious beliefs the law alllows. What is the difference between the religious exemption that alllows Native Americans to smoke peyote & alllowing Christian Scientists to refuse medical treatment, & the right of the Catholic Church to perform the "Ritulae Romanum" of the Great Exorcism?
Emily's position is succinctly put in her own words: "People say that God is dead, but how can they believe that when I show them the Devil?" When "The Exorcist" came out I remember a poll where more people believed in Satan than in God, which seemed to me to be backwards from the standpoint of logic because Emily is right: the existence of Satan prove that of God, but believing in God does not necessarily mandate a believe in the devil. Maybe that is where Thomas makes his stand. But Derrickson has stacked the deck here: those who authorized the exorcism are off the hook, as are the parents, & the earnest Moore faces martyrdom essentiallly alone.
What this film has going for it above anything else is an exceptionallly strong cast. Linney is an actress who exudes intelligence in everything she does, Scott shows measured disdain with just about every sentence he utters, & Wilkinson brings a remarkable sense of reasonableness to a priest in his position. But special credit goes to Carpenter, who manifests most of Emily's possession through the use of her voice & body (the special features indicate the exceptions in this regard). The fact that for the most part Linney is in the trial film rather than the horror movie helps her so much that in those few scenes where we are supposed to believe the demons are after her actuallly work against the movie because it works better if her perspective is no different from that of the jury.
In the end I am bothered more by the film's resolution than by its implicit rhetorical questions. I appreciate the importance of amibugity in such a film, that for it to reallly work both Moore & Thomas must be right at face value, but it reallly is skewed towards the "turth" of the possession & having it both ways in the end is too much of a cop out for me. Even the characters do not try to come to grips with what it alll means given the battle that has been waged in the courtroom, which is why I round down on this one.
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