I’m a pretty big fan of legal thrillers and courtroom dramas.
If we had 3-5 studio-backed legal thrillers and courtroom dramas that were adequate to good every year, our dying cinematic apparatus may begin to heal.
Forget spending $25 million an episode on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Fork over a few million bucks for some A-listers and character actors to yell at each other in court or organize class action lawsuits, I say.
The last great American legal thriller/courtroom drama I can remember was Dark Waters, from 2019. Here was Todd Haynes, one of the best living directors, telling a story about Mark Ruffalo: Attorney at Law investigating a poisoned water conspiracy. Great!
(Mark Ruffalo, you may recall, plays the Hulk in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and in a few dozen other things as well).
Is it a digression if you start with it? I digress.
This is a review of Anatomy of a Fall. It is the second prominent French courtroom drama I’ve seen in the last year, the other being Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. I’m not going to compare the two any further as it’s been too long since I’ve seen Saint Omer, but I do recommend you seek it out.
Anyway.
Anatomy of a Fall is director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning French courtroom drama about a writer named Sandra (Sandra Hüller) who is accused of murdering her husband Samuel (Samuel Theiss).
Samuel’s body was discovered in the snow by the couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is visually impaired and only realizes what he’s discovered when he’s crouched over a bloody body.
Samuel had fallen from an open window in his third-floor workspace; after the discovery of suspicious blood splatters and an audio recording of him and Sandra having a tense argument the day before his death, she is indicted for murder. Daniel is a key witness to the events before and after his father’s fall.
This is a classic courtroom drama set-up, but Anatomy of a Fall is aiming higher than that. In its insistence on ambiguity, the movie sometimes mistakes vagueness for substance.
Take the eye-roll-inducing marketing campaign. At the beginning of the film, you’re prompted to visit a website: Did She Do It Dot Com. (I’m not linking to it! And don’t go to it at the beginning of the movie! Put your phone away!)
There is a clear-cut verdict in the movie, but Triet leaves it open as to whether or not Sandra actually did it. Was Samuel’s fall accidental? Was it suicide? Or did Sandra knock him over the head and push him?
We’re meant to read Hüller’s face, examine her under a microscope in the same way the French legal system and the media do. Doing this implicates us. Audience culpable.
But centering this uncertainty pushes another, more interesting one to the periphery: The murkiness of Sandra’s failing marriage, the explosion of resentments that prompt a relationship-ending argument, and, perhaps, something more violent and sinister. Maybe I should just rewatch Gone Girl.
Anatomy of a Fall never really explores those things in much depth. The movie’s script, which Triet co-wrote with Arthur Harari, introduces character traits and revelations like they’re evidence that can be mentioned when convenient.
For example, they make both Sandra and Samuel writers, yet their literary ambitions are only important in the context of their marriage or in situations where it might implicate Sandra in her husband’s death.
There’s also the case of the son, who’s the only witness to the crime. His (gasp!) request to testify for a second time late in the trial held me in suspense, and then he delivered a didactic monologue that weakened Triet’s simple but powerful images of him sitting in court and listening to heartbreaking revelations about his parents.
Now reader, it may sound like I hated this movie. I didn’t!
If it feels like I’m coming down hard on it, it’s only because it seems to have convinced a lot of people that it’s much more than a mere courtroom drama.
And what I’d really like to say is: There is nothing wrong with being a completely passable courtroom drama. As I said earlier, we need more of them!
I think it’s fine that this film is “filled with herrings that surely turned red from blushing with shame.” I think it’s great that there are crime scene reenactments, talk of blood splatter patterns, and convenient audio recordings.
Genre trappings don’t always have to be a trap.
Anatomy of a Fall is easily at its best when it’s in court. Triet films these sequences with an intellectual rigor and control of pacing that is riveting. The debate among attorneys and the conflicting witness and expert testimonies are captivating and passionate. Both sides are trying, desperately, to arrive at their version of the truth.
Hüller is fantastic at the center of this war. The restraint her character must show while her life is picked apart, while her most private moments are shed in the least flattering light, takes its toll in her eyes even as she stands stone-faced.
Triet does a great job at showing the courtroom-as-stage. Shots of people smirking and talking amongst themselves in court inject a true sense of theater here; some of them are there for a show.
And while the lead performer for Triet’s camera is Sandra, the main event for the courtroom audience is the prosecutor.
Played with smarmy entitlement by Antoine Reinartz, this is a man who’s easy to hate. (Don’t let that hate deter you from nominating him for Best Supporting Actor, Academy members!) He shames Sandra for her extra-marital flings, and tries to use her fictional work as proof that she committed murder.
Ridiculous, and yet these parts of the movie work because of Triet and her actors’ connection with the material. If life outside the courtroom seems only to exist in this film to support life in court, then you might as well put on a show for the jury and the audience.
How do you say “Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle” in French?