The Thin Blue Line

Released:  August 25^th, 1988

Rated:  NR

Studio:  Miramax

Starring:  Randall Adams, David Harris

Directed by:  Errol Morris 

Written by:  Errol Morris

Personal Bias Alert:  likes crime docs, understands the flaws in America’s judicial system

7 of 10

            After being released from prison, documentary subject Randall Adams sued director Errol Morris for the rights to his life story.  He wasn’t going after the money from the film, nor was he making big plans to cash in on his story.  In fact, Adams lived a relatively obscure life after his release, so much so that despite being a famously exonerated man, his death in 2010 wasn’t noted nationally.  Speculation over why the lawsuit came to pass has no clear answer, with Morris stating “it’s a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there’s always a mess somewhere.”  It’s too bad that Morris waited to make this statement until after the film was released, because it would have made a perfect ending to the muddled story his documentary unfolds.

              The Thin Blue Line investigates the murder of Texas police officer Robert W. Wood, who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop in November 1976.  Adams would later be convicted of the killing based on flimsy evidence, and Morris would eventually come across the case while working on a film about the prosecution psychiatrist nicknamed Doctor Death.  A dogged researcher, Morris would spend the next two years investigating the case, abandoning the ostentatiously named doctor in favor of the subdued Adams’ very troubling story.

            Morris clearly believes that Adams is innocent, and uses his comprehensive understanding of the case to focus in on where things went wrong.  Racism, suckered cops, and fear of outsiders in small town America only scratches the surface of the complications surrounding the case, so Morris has plenty of material to cover.  To help make this wealth of exposition go down easy, he employed what was at the time a new technique in documentary filmmaking:  reenactments.  This is common now, especially in crime stories, but at the time it was believed that documentaries shouldn’t stray from absolute fact.  That Morris used these reenactments to show the different ways the murder might have gone down only made his technical choice all the more controversial, famously getting the film rejected by the Oscars for having too much scripted material.  But in this case of he said she said, allowing the viewers to see the way the story slowly changed throughout the investigation shows how even the small, good-intentioned efforts of law enforcement officials led this case astray.

            Of course, there were larger and far more harmful blunders throughout the case, the biggest of which was the absolute reliance on eye-witnesses to tie Adams to the crime.  Eye-witnesses are highly unreliable even when they have the best intentions, and the group of people who brought Adams down were far from model citizens.  In fact, he never would have been accused in the first place if then petty thief David Harris hadn’t thrown him under the bus, claiming that he was in the passenger seat when Adams shot Officer Wood.  Morris returns the favor, arguing throughout the film that Harris was the actual shooter.  The problem is, there’s so many conflicting sides to the story that even this film’s very slanted version is less than convincing.  There’s simply too many things that don’t add up, and the heap of complications that Morris throws out only further confuses the matter.  This uncertainty would be fine if the film was about how the case went wrong and the reasons why, but in trying to make the case that Adams is innocent and Harris is guilty, the film ultimately fails.

            It still manages to be rather absorbing, and anytime cases of police misconduct pop up, I think of this film.  It’s very good at encapsulating how badly investigations can go, and how long the mistakes can remain hidden away.  The police are just people too, and as Morris said, when there’s people involved, there’s always a mess somewhere.

            Other Notes:

Ø  The judge came off as an unlikable, smug guy, and his chuckle after he tells the story of what happened to the woman that turned in Dillinger was chilling.

Ø  I love Philip Glass’s score.  It sounds vaguely like Metamorphosis, but I’m unclear if there is really a connection.

Ø  Whatever happened to the milkshake?