Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Rated R, mainly because the film is determining whether or not someone's death was a murder or a suicide.  Both topics bring their own traumatizing elements.  Spriraling out of this, because this is the story of a trial, much of the film tries to bring out the defendant's illicit behavior.  This means that sex and drugs are discussed, if not seen.  We also see the corpse, which is gory.  R.

DIRECTOR: Justine Triet

Like, it's really good.  I can't deny that this is a really good movie.  But is it Best Picture good?  I mean, we are starting to run into this every year.   Now, I will say, I've been looking for an argument that Greta Gerwig should have been up for Best Director for Barbie.  Then everyone said, "Who are you going to pull off?"  And my takeaway? Justine Triet.  Yeah, it sucks that I'm pulling another director off of the Best Director page.  But also, Anatomy of a Fall is a decent courtroom drama that doesn't really break new ground.

It's weird, because I'm going to be writing this blog with the knowledge that Anatomy of a Fall doesn't really do anything wrong.  It just doesn't do anything  better than other movies have done.  If I had to be gracious and say that it did one thing better than anything else is to remind me that I should not get arrested in France.  Geez, one of my bigger running gags in the movie was just shouting "Objection" and then a thing that I heard from American courtroom dramas.  First of all, let's go with the dumbest stuff right now.  It seemed like one of the major points of the movie was that the judge absolutely seemed to hate Sandra, right?  Like, I kept waiting for that to be a plot point and that someone was going to bring it up.  But do you know what actually happened with that?  Nothing.  No one was going to say a darned thing about how the judge really seemed to have it out for the defense, even though it seemed like the defense was just doing its job, you know, defending the client?  Again, I know little-to-nothing about the French legal system.  I just know that I shouldn't get arrested there because they'll treat you terribly.

One of the reviews of Anatomy of a Fall called the film a prestige film that was turned into an airport read.  I kind of agree with that.  Maybe it colored me too much before sitting down to write this.  Again, I gave this movie the least chance for success out of any Best Pictures out there.  Someone mentioned to me that Anatomy of a Fall was just alright and I think that was the vibe I went into it with.  It is dramatic as heck.  Golly, the pacing and the storytelling is pretty darned good. In terms of understanding that this is one of those stories where we'll never really know the truth about whether Samuel jumped or was murdered, it doesn't quite leave the end one-sided.  I mean, we never see the event in real time. Because this is a story more about the trial and the fallout of the trial, it does highlight the limited nature of a trial.  Anatomy reminds us that it isn't necessarily an exporing of the objective truth.  It is a reminder that the justice system is really more about who can argue better.  

That was the weirdest thing.  As much as the story was about presenting evidence, which it only did occasionally, almost everyone who went up on that stand presented potential theories and you had to pick the best one of the group.  I suppose a good ambiguous story gives you a lot of evidence and you have to go back and forth whether or not the defense did it or not. I don't know.  Anatomy of a Fall made the justice system such an environment of bullying that I instantly stuck with Sandra from moment one. Heck, she could have even done it and I still wanted to defend her the entire time.  Naturally, I want to compare the movie to Doubt, a film that never really tells us what happened.  But with Doubt, you are left with the horror of two very different, equally bad scenarios.  With Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra, despite potentially having murdered her husband, comes across with so much sympathy even if she did it that it doesn't create the same result that Doubt  injected into its movie.

I'm never going to advocate murder.  It's my thing. But let's say that Sandra did murder her husband.  It seems like he was borderline emotionally abusive and cruel to her.  She would have to abandon her son.  That's all terrible.  But the best case scenario, a murderer would be in prison. I suppose that's the majority of crime dramas.  But the alternative, which is the way that I viewed the movie, is way more tragic.  First of all, I consider nothing more tragic than an innocent person going to jail.  The corrections system is a system of punishment, not rehabilitation.  But this would be a woman who lost her husband to suicide.  A child would lose both parents in the wake of an unfathomable tragedy.  

But the bigger thing that the movie kind of touches on, but doesn't really hit very hard is the fact that Sandra's career is over.  She has one of those careers that rests on the goodwill and support of a community of readers.  People judge her art based on her morality.  Remember, I'm the one who had lots of questions about the appearances of Amber Heard in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.  I'm part of those masses who has a hard time divorcing the art from the artist.  But the prosecutor in the story brings in Sandra's novels as evidence towards her character.  If Sandra is a modest public figure, it would be hard to separate her art from her reality.  But when the prosecutor brings in her novels as forms of evidence towards her mental health and her disposition, that inexorably makes the work the same as the artist.  The only benefit that would come out of a trial like this is the macabre out there, who would read her work as a means to glean insight into a killer.  It's upsetting.

What Anatomy of a Fall absolutely crushes is the effect that it has upon Sandra's son.  The very nature of being put on trial is a stigmatizing event.  Those people around Sandra are fallout when it comes to trying to defend her.  Remind me to be a little critical when it comes to how Daniel processes this.  I'm going to be a bit of a bully, but I just can't come to terms with what this character does.  Anyway, I almost care more about Daniel than I do about Sandra.  I feel for Sandra. Absolutely.  The performance that Sandra Huller gives Sandra the character is what cements the work.  But Sandra is intentionally reserved as a character.  She's holding it all in only to let go at times in the movie.  She's willing to have everything out there about her relationship with Samuel, partially to stay out of jail, but also because it seems that she's very open with her life as an author.  If she pulls from her real life, the notion of hiding things just because some things may be considered icky is beyond her. But she also doesn't go out of her way to tell her ten-year-old about her sexual proclivities.  When he's exposed to all that, it's a bit much.  That's the stuff I watch this movie for.  I'm more interested in what happens to Daniel, in light of all of the trauma that he already went through.

Okay, let's bully Daniel a bit.  The experiment with the dog?  That seems a bit much.  I don't know.  I'm going through anecdotal evidence for things.  But it seems like a kid wouldn't poison his dog, especially given his visceral reaction to that dog's near death experience, for the sake of proving something that ultimately didn't have a lot of say in court.  Maybe the bigger problem I have is the sequence of events with Daniel.  A key idea to the story is that Daniel doesn't know if his mom is innocent or guilty. Marge, who clearly doesn't understand the crux of her job of keeping Daniel neutral, tells him that he just has to go with his gut and follow it hard.  I don't get that logic.  I don't see how poisoning the dog stems from these conversations.  It seems like, if the dog didn't vomit, it wouldn't really change the narrative of Mom's guilt.  Sure, it gives Mom a little bit more leeway when it came to collecting evidence.  But I don't know if it helped her as much as he thought it would.

I hate to be crapping on this movie because I enjoyed it.  But I do agree with the New York Times.  It has elements of a prestige movie, but it seems kind of forgettable in the long run.  It's got that crime drama thriller thing going on, but without the gravitas to make me remember the movie in five years.