ElMaruecan82
"A Cry in the Dark" in an Australian film from an Australian director, Fred Schepisi, chronicling the most famous trial of Australian history, the disappearance of a nine- week old baby, Azaria Chamberlain, in a campground near Ayers Rock (world's biggest rock) in 1980. The sad episode is infamous for the "The Dingo took my baby" line, the desperate cry of a mother, Lindy Chamberlain who saw the dingo coming off the tent where she put little Azaria a few minutes before, before it would be reduced to an 'opinion' debated by millions of Australians and questioned in trial. The Chamberlains would end up being convicted for the murder of their own baby after no evidence of a piece of clothing took by a dingo could be found.And whether it was the dingo who took little Azaria or Lindy, with the complicity of her husband Michael, who killed her child, matters less in the course of the film than the mechanisms that lead to one conviction to another. And Schepisi handles the case with a relative precision allowing us to understand to which extent, media, public opinion, the carrying of the case by the Law, the limitations of the police investigations, and last but no least, the reactions of the Chamberlain's family influenced perceptions and divided people. Recognized by the American Film Institute as the 9th in the list of the 10 greatest courtroom dramas, "A Cry in the Dark" provides a powerful social commentary about the fourth power and its undeniable interference with public opinion in the name of emotionalism and sensationalism.If I were bold, I would even make a comparison with the Dreyfus affair in France, although the political implications are totally different. But both cases strongly divided opinions, and the cultural background of the main protagonist played a significant role. Indeed, the Chamberlains are followers of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, technically, we don't learn much about it except in the way it strongly influences their lives and can easily make them look or sound like an obscurantist Church from common people's perspective. Michael is a pastor and constantly refers to Jesus and the end of the world, even when he's stuck by such a tragic event, even when he thanks people from the campground for their help. But it's Lindy who crystallizes the hatred and the suspicion. She looks cold and tough, has no difficulty to evoke the most gruesome details about the investigation, she's in a total contradiction about the way opinion would picture a mother who just lost her baby. At the end, what we have is a sensational case deviated by an excess of emotions and a woman who lacks this very emotion, and when the evidence doesn't speak for her, we feel that the fight is already lost. The power of "A Cry in the Dark" relies on the director's capacity to handle a very complex case, full of difficult notions, and encapsulate the public opinion through a series of little scenes showing people debating the case, even fighting over it. These little moments punctuating the legal plot line enable us not to understand the trial but why the Chamberlain Family lost it, as soon as the accusation stopped being pointed at the dingo but at them. It's even ironic that the dingo, which was one of the most representative animals of Australia, started to be seen as a sympathetic scapegoat, while Lindy Chamberlain stroke people from the courtroom as an icy and ruthless woman. And on that level, it's impossible to get further in the review without mentioning Meryl Streep. Calling it a virtuoso performance is almost a pleonasm because she carries with her own talent whatever made the film an instant classic. Not to diminish the merits of the director, writers, or even Sam Neil's supporting role as Michael, but the film feels like a minor production, it was even produced by the Golan-Globus pairing, more famous for 80's B- movies. It's like a TV Movie careful to report in a documentary-style the Chamberlain case without falling in a melodramatic trap. And it works for most of the part, because making the Chamberlains sympathetic would have reduced them to simple victims of circumstances while in reality, they contributed to their own misfortune. And Streep is able to metamorphose into a strong and tough women who refuses to play the game, to laugh or to weep just to please the jury, she doesn't use tears to implore people to believe them. They think she killed her baby, well, that's too bad. Meryl Streep, Oscar-nominated for the role of Lindy Chamberlain, redefines again the rule of acting through her extraordinary talent to multiply the accents, to be realer than the real, and to embody in her eyes all the emotion needed to elevate the film. In the course of the trial, while Michael looks absolutely devastated, his faith shattered by an intolerable bad luck streak, Lindy stands still, her eyes full of an expression of anger and dark confidence enough to chill the blood of anyone. First seen as a loving mother, she quickly becomes a suspect, then a witch, and then even the jury avoids seeing her. I wouldn't go as far as saying that the movie must be watched if only for Meryl Streep's performance, but as it doesn't have the stylistic ambitions of "Kramer vs. Kramer", if it wasn't for Meryl Streep, the movie would have definitely sunk into oblivion and not become this pop-culture phenomenon forever associated with Australia.The film was released in 1988 after the Chamberlains were finally acquitted when a baby clothing was found in a dingo lair. It's deliberately anticlimactic because the essential lies elsewhere; it's less about the Azaria Chamberlain case than the sad influence emotions can have on people, manipulating their opinion at the expense of truth. For that, "A Cry in the Dark" is an important film that hasn't lost its relevance.
