Classic Movie Review: Brother's Keeper (1992)

Brother’s Keeper (1992)

Directed by: Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky.

 

Four year before they made the excellent Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills – a documentary that spawned two sequels, and is often held up as one of the best true crime docs in history, Joe Berliner and Bruce Sinofsky made Brother’s Keeper – a “true crime” doc in a lower key than the other film. It focused on the case of Delbert Ward – and his brothers. They lived in Munnsville, New York – a small town of only a few hundred people – one of those places where everyone knows everyone. And everyone did know the Ward boys – four brothers who didn’t bathe very often, came to town riding a couple of tractors, and basically kept to themselves on their large farm. While no one in town could rightly be called friends of the Ward boys – they weren’t enemies either – everyone basically kept to themselves. That is until the second oldest Ward boy – Bill – was found dead in his bed one morning – and Delbert was charged with his murder.

 

The Ward boys are not very smart – although, whether Delbert and the others actually suffered from intellectual disabilities, or whether they simply choose to remain mainly cut off from modern life, and hence no wise to its wise, is open for debate. Bill, the brother who winds up dead, had been suffering for a while – coughing and wheezing, complaining of pain in various places, etc. There is no evidence that any of them ever went to a doctor – so when Bill wound up dead, everyone assumed it was natural causes. But the cops find some evidence that confuses them – there’s debate as to whether a pillow was used to smother Bill, and some strange results on the autopsy. The police haul Delbert in for questioning – while there were four brothers, there were only two beds, and Delbert shared with Bill. They get a “confession” out of Delbert – but did they trick it out of him, coax it out of him – bully someone who wasn’t smart enough to know his rights to confess to something he didn’t do? The state at first floats the idea that it was a mercy killing – and then starts talking about something darker, and more perverted than that.

 

If you’re thinking this is going to be a documentary about a small town divided – you’d be wrong – while a few people do wonder if Delbert really did kill Bill as a mercy killing, no one in town wants to see him go to jail for it. They hold fundraisers for his legal defense fund – and the surviving Ward brothers become more accepted in the community than ever before. The case draws national attention – the filmmakers show the brothers watching themselves in a segment with Connie Chung for example. But what Berliner and Sinofsky capture is deeper than those segments on the show – because they stay there for so long, that everyone ends up simply accepting their presence. One of the other brothers, Lymon, is painfully shy in almost all social situations – but eventually he is able to open up to the camera – at least somewhat. The same is true for Delbert – who’s more articulate with the filmmakers than he is anywhere else.

 

The filmmakers also capture this small town brilliantly – and the attitudes in it, and why the police officers and the prosecutors – both from “the city” (what city? Who know, who cares) never do understand. I do worry that we’re going to spend the next four (or God forbid 8) years comparing everything to Trump, and Trump’s America – but you can certainly see the attitude many talk about contributing to the rise of Trump in this film. The locals talk about how everyone from the city thinks they’re all a bunch of idiot hicks – and they look on them, and think they can walk all over them without noticing. The prosecutor describes Delbert and the rest of the Wards as “outcasts” in their community – and he may not really be wrong – but the community would rather have their own outcasts, than someone from the city. The feeling that led to Trump’s rise didn’t spring up overnight – you can certainly see that in this film from 25 years ago. Yet, you can also see the humanity in rural people – some of whom are more open minded than you’d think (as one older man says even if there was sex going on between the brothers, who cares – it’s none of his business).

 

I won’t reveal the outcome of the trial – although I don’t think, the way the film is structured, that it’s ever really in doubt – especially when we get to the trial scenes themselves, which can be painful to watch. Paradise Lost and its sequels will always be the films that Berlinger and Sinofsky are remembered for – say what you want about them, but they are among the only films ever that you could argue saved someone’s life – but Brother’s Keeper is another triumph for the pair – and one of the best documentaries of the 1990s. It deserved to be more widely known.

Movie Review: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory *** ½

Directed by: Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky.

The story of the West Memphis Three – Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelly and James Baldwin – finally had a happy ending on August 19, 2011 when the three men, now in their 30s, were released from prison following an plea agreement related to the 1994 case that sentenced Misskelly and Baldwin to prison for life and Echols to death row for murdering three 8 year boys. When documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky first went to West Memphis to document the trial and interview all involved, they thought they’d be making a documentary about how three heavy metal obsessed teenagers turned violent and murdered three innocent children, perhaps in a Satanic ritual. What they found instead was much more disturbing. The police, having no leads and no evidence, ended up focusing on Echols because he was known around town as “weird”. He dressed all in black, painted his fingernails and in a country music town, loved heavy metal music. They expanded their questioning to his friends, and eventually got Jesse Misskelly, who is mildly mentally handicapped, to confess to the murders after over 12 hours of questioning – only 40 minutes or so that was actually recorded. It doesn’t matter that even in the part that was taped, there was massive inaccuracies in Miss Kelly’s story – saying for example they abducted the boys at 9 in the morning, when really they didn’t go missing until after 7 at night, or saying that Echols and Baldwin had raped the boys first, although there was no evidence of that on the boys bodies. There was really no evidence of any kind – the boys were found naked and bound at the bottom of a river, and all blood or DNA evidence was washed away. Miskelly was convicted at his separate trial first, based on his confession that he recanted. But since he refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, the confession wasn’t even admissible in their trials. But it didn’t matter – the media attention for the case had been so widespread, including the details of the confession (aside for the inaccuracies) that jurors went in with their minds made up – and Echols and Baldwin were also convicted.

The first Paradise Lost movie was released in 1996 on HBO, and the resulting controversy was nationwide. People were outraged, and the West Memphis Three had a large number of new followers and donors to their legal defense team, who filed appeal after appeal. But all appeals had to go through the same judge who tried the case, and he wasn’t having any of it. He rejected appeal after appeal, despite the mounting evidence of the teenager’s innocence. The filmmakers made Paradise Lost 2 in 2000, and showed the defendants as changed young men from the years behind bars, and raise more questions about their guilt. Now 10 years later, they are back with Paradise Lost 3, which details everything the new defense lawyers have uncovered, for their appeals. The version that I saw, at the Toronto Film Festival, is not the final version. The filmmakers finished it on August 15, just four days before the young men were released. They are adding footage of that to the end of this movie, in time for the New York Film Festival, but weren’t able to have it edited in time for TIFF.

Paradise Lost 3 has some shocking moments in it – I will never be able to get the image of the murdered boys out of my head, but nothing shocked me as much as the fact that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims, who in previous films had gone off on more than one rant about how evil the killers were, having mock funerals for them, shooting fake bodies of them he made and declaring they were going to burn forever in hellfire, admitting that he was wrong. He looked at the new evidence, and sees the boys were innocent. He is still a fascinating character in this movie, but time has dampened him. He’s not even the most logical counter-suspect anymore – but another of the boy’s stepfathers is.

Few films can actually claim to have saved someone’s life, but the Paradise Lost films can. Echols thanks the filmmakers on camera in this film, saying that if they weren’t there right from the beginning to document the case and bring it national prominence, then he is convinced the State would have executed him by now. He’s not wrong. Echols has changed a lot over the years – no longer the defiant, bratty but extremely intelligent teenager who said in the first film that he would remembered forever as a boogeyman, even though he was innocent. He seems calm, his hairline is receding, and the son he had who was just a baby when he was put away is now almost as old as he was. Jason Baldwin has gone from the baby faced, soft spoken young man he was, into a balding, larger man in his in 30s. And Miskelly still seems very similar to how he was, but he too has aged. A lot can happen to a person over the years – to these three more than most.

I have no idea what Echols, Baldwin and Miskelly will do with the rest of their lives now that they are out of jail. I guess they could do anything they want. Their plea agreement allowed them to “maintain their innocence, but admit the prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them” – probably a way for the State to Protect themselves for a lawsuit. But that doesn’t really matter – after spending more than half their lives in jail, they are now free.

But who really did kill those three young boys? I doubt it’s a question we’ll ever have an answer to. The West Memphis police are not about to reopen the case, and the DA won’t want to try anyone even if they do find someone. That would be to admit that they were wrong. And one thing we’ve learned from the Paradise Lost trilogy is how anyone in power refuses to admit when they’ve made a mistake. Those three murdered children deserve better than that.