Tortuous Devil’s Knot

In the more than 20 years since three little boys were found brutalized and murdered and left in a creek in West Memphis, no fewer than four documentary films have been released about the case (the Paradise Lost films, a greatly revered trilogy by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky; and Amy Berg’s 2012 update, West of Memphis), with another fictionalized account from director Monte Hellman coming sometime next year. The case of the West Memphis Three, as it came to be known, with its star-studded cast of outraged truthers - including rockers Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins and director Peter Jackson, among a glittery lineup eager to join the cause celebre of the innocent accused young men - had clear, sexy appeal to a variety of media reps, but generally speaking, the films, and articles and many of the endless updated news reports on the subject, have focused on the wrongly accused boys, leaving the original grieving families more or less to their own misery. None of the docs, as fascinating as they were, bothered to spend much time with the other victims of the murders: the miserable parents of the original victims.

Enter ethereal Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, whose acclaimed previous work has shown a penchant for the subtle shifts of perception inherent in our establishment of community. His fictionalized account is entirely - somewhat peculiarly - concerned with the first third of this tortured narrative: the murder of the boys, the accusations and immediate trials of the defendants, and the various improprieties employed by the West Memphis police department’s zealous persecution of the accused.

Here, Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), the mother of one of the murdered little boys, is placed front and center, the emotional fulcrum of the piece. She and her husband, Terry (Alessandro Nivola), her son’s stepfather, shown here and elsewhere to be a prime suspect in the killings (and whom the police have inexplicably declined to investigate), stand in as the other side of this unimaginable grief - what for many around the country was a juicy detective story, for Pam and the other aggrieved parents was the single most horrific nightmare any of them could have imagined.

Repping the investigative side, Egoyan has cast Colin Firth (who, as ever, is game but it must be said remains an unlikely Southerner) as Ron Lax, an independent gumshoe, who sees, in the cop’s far too simple open-and-shut affirmation and the panicked cries of satanic cults and ritual sacrifice unleashed on this God-fearing town, reason to disbelieve their official version of events. Instead, he takes his queries to the accused themselves, led by charismatic, fiercely intelligent Damien Echols (James Hamrick), a practitioner, it turns out, of nothing more than a regrettable heavy-metal enthusiasm and a penchant for black hair dye.

As the case begins to unwind, and Pam, suffering from continued nightmares about her lost son, finally begins to doubt her husband’s version of events, Egoyan moves farther away from the known signposts of the case and instead further into the grieving mother’s head space, documenting the continued psychological misery of her situation, even as Lax begins to close in on what he firmly believes is the truth, and a far different conclusion from the police and the rest of the town, who have been whipped up into a satanic-fearing frenzy.

Egoyan, whose filmography includes such atmospherically esoteric fare as The Sweet Hereafter and Adoration, seems more at home dealing with the universally disquieting ideas of the tableau than the nuts-and-bolts dynamic of the hugely controversial case. The film favors a perpetuation of the hillbilly, God-fearing, satanically paranoid good people of the town, rather than digging deeper into the whys and wherefores. As in his Oscar-nominated Hereafter, he’s fascinated by the dangers of group-think and collective grief, finding the fissures in our ability to cope with unimaginable heartache by drawing quick and resolute conclusions that may or may not have any foothold in the honest truth.

As it stands, though, there isn’t much in the way of what you might call dramatic arc. Ending as it does, with the convictions, Egoyan scrupulously leaves out approximately two-thirds of the story, which he’s then forced to summarize in a long series of postscripts, causing one to question what it was about the case that engaged the enigmatic director in the first place - save the creepy, ominous scenes of the little boys wandering through the woods on their bikes, and unwittingly into the very maw of deepest evil. The final product feels like an accomplished first third of what would make a fascinating and horrific film, as opposed to standing as it does, an odd testament to Egoyan’s very particular - and apparently limited, budgetarily or otherwise - interest, like a man who buys a fine, expensive tux but only in order to wear the cummerbund.

Devil’s Knot 84

Cast: Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Alessandro Nivola, James Hamrick, Mirelle Enos, Stephen Moyer, Kevin Durand, Elias Koteas, Bruce Greenwood Director: Atom Egoyan Rating: No rating Running time: 114 minutes