Errol Morris’s film about a Dallas murder and the man convicted of it remains the model for true crime. Patient, cold on the surface and furious underneath, with re-enactments that argue rather than illustrate and a Philip Glass score that will not let you rest.
Late in November 1976 a Dallas police officer named Robert Wood stopped a car on a dark road and was shot dead beside it. Randall Adams, who had come from Ohio a few weeks earlier, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to death. David Harris, a teenager from Vidor in east Texas who had picked Adams up that morning when his car ran out of petrol, and who owned the car the officer stopped, said Adams fired the shots. Adams said he was back at his motel by then. Errol Morris went to Texas to make a film about something else, met Adams, and made this instead. It is the best film about a criminal case we know, and it has not aged a day.
Morris does not narrate and does not appear. He sits people in front of a plain backdrop and lets them talk: Adams in prison whites, Harris in orange, the Dallas homicide detectives Gus Rose, Jackie Johnson and Marshall Touchton in jackets and ties, Harris’s Vidor friends Hootie Nelson, Dennis Johnson and Floyd Jackson looking as if they have wandered in from a bar. Between the interviews he cuts re-enactments of the stop: headlights, a patrol car door, a hand on a holster, a milkshake tossed from a window and hitting the road in slow motion, staged again and again with the details altered as each speaker alters them. Robert Chappell and Stefan Czapsky shoot these in deep blue and hot red, on wet tarmac, with no faces, so they never pretend to show what happened. They show what somebody says happened.
We were horrified, and the horror comes on slowly, because nobody raises their voice. A detective explains how a statement was taken as if describing a good day’s fishing. Edith James and Dennis White, who defended Adams, describe a trial they could see they were going to lose. Sam Kittrell of the Vidor police talks about Harris as a boy the town had been dealing with for years. The film lets you work out for yourself that Harris was too young to be executed and Adams was not, and that Dallas wanted somebody it could execute. Paul Barnes cuts newspaper clippings, hand-drawn maps and clips from the drive-in double bill the two men sat through that night between the faces, so that every claim is set beside a document.
Philip Glass’s score is a set of arpeggios that circle and never resolve, and it turns the case into a loop the film cannot get out of, which is right. It also does something less useful. With the slow motion and Ted Bafaloukos’s spare, glossy staging, the killing becomes handsome, and there were moments when we felt the film admiring its own surface. The milkshake is the shot everyone remembers, and it comes round at least five times.
There is a harder complaint. Some of the witnesses, one of them a woman who tells us she has always fancied herself as a detective, are filmed so that the audience will laugh at them. We laughed, and then felt slightly ashamed, because a man was on death row on the strength of what these people said and a Texas accent is not a character flaw. Morris also never presses anyone on camera. The argument is entirely in the cutting, and a viewer who does not put it together will come away thinking they watched a set of amiable people disagree about a car.
Most critics have been unanimous, and we are with them. The one cooler notice found it taxing, and we can see why: at 103 minutes it asks you to hold six or seven versions of one night in your head at once. Every prestige true-crime series since has borrowed the plain backdrop, the re-enactment and the humming score. Almost none of them has borrowed the discipline of refusing to tell you what to think until the last possible minute.
That last minute we will not describe, except to say it is the plainest scene in the film and the one we have never managed to forget. Watch it alone, with the sound up. The 15 certificate is for a single act of violence you never see clearly, and that is the point.
