This is the most disturbing movie I have seen in a long time. Because everything is plausible, the story is very real, and the acting is superb. If Russel Crowe doesn't get an Oscar nod for this the Academy isn't doing their job.
I went hoping for a classic prison break action film but instead got an emotional drama. Instead of focusing on how an innocent person gets locked away they focused on the failure of the appeals process, the failure of police investigators, and the increasing alienation of a man from the system.
During the scenes where Russel Crowe is teaching English, two books come up. "Don Quixote De La Mancha" by Cervantes and "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas. The premise is that Don Quixote's refusal to play by the rules of reality and rationality were in fact necessary.
So an otherwise rational man decided to be irrational and break his wife out of prison. The character struggle between doing what is right and what is necessary made some of the most engaging theater experience that I've ever sat through. In the end the escape is successful, but success always balances on a fine thread held by razors.
And what disturbs me most is how real everything could be. How cold and uncaring the bureaucracy that does it's job instead of searching for truth. How could this movie affect me in such a visceral way when Texas has already executed innocent men? Our system is supposed to be biased towards letting the guilty go free instead of punishing the innocent.
Have we as a society crossed a boundary where we accept a bureaucracy that is inhuman?
I think we have, and this disturbs me. While we can change Congressmen every two years, Presidents every four, and Senators every six, we cannot change the Bureaucracy. This needs to change.
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2 comments:
Your last comment is one of my hot button issues, While we can change Congressmen every two years, Presidents every four, and Senators every six, we cannot change the Bureaucracy. Not only that, we can't change the bureaucrats and we can't change the rules they enforce.
We are over-regulated to insane levels. I hate to quote myself, but "We are strangling in a bureaucracy with a Code of Federal Regulations that has grown like a bacterial culture. A nation that was founded by a constitution that fills about 14 printed pages in today's technologies, passes financial reform bills that go over 2000 pages, health care bills that go almost 3000 pages, and more. Each bill creates hundreds of new regulations, which are so poorly written they have to be refined by hundreds of court cases. The court cases effectively create new law and new regulations. Since congress is in session every year and passes at least one new law every year, the total number of laws and regulations increases without limit and everything eventually becomes illegal."
First, we need to "stop digging the hole". We need to write a "Sunset provision" into every new law, an expiration date might reduce the rate of expansion of the regulations books. And then we need to start cutting the CFR while we cut the budgets by 40%. I believe you could cut the CFR by 75% and not make a single American's life worse. Well, maybe the bureaucrats you add to the ranks of the unemployed.
Good stuff. I need to add you to my blogroll.
"Our system is supposed to be biased towards letting the guilty go free instead of punishing the innocent" -
Actually, by my humble observation, the system does both, simultaneously.
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