Character, witness

Anatomy of a Fall is courtroom drama turned inside out

[Oscar nominations are out and with this review I’ve covered all ten Best Picture nominees including Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Past Lives, American Fiction, Oppenheimer, Maestro and The Zone of Interest. Between now and the ceremonies on March 10 I hope to see films nominated for other awards and make my annual predictions. Watch this space! ]  

Sandra is a mystery writer — sufficiently well-known to merit an in-person media interview, but not enough to rate a camera crew — who feels isolated and friendless in Grenoble; her husband Samuel, whose hometown it is, does some kind of work in the attic of their chalet; their 11-year-old son Daniel is nearly blind and relies on his dog to get around. That’s about all we know when Samuel goes, unobserved, out the attic window and dies.

This starts a police investigation and legal case that reveals nearly all the facts we’ll find out about them: For example, that the couple had money troubles, the boy lost his vision in a motorcycle accident that was Samuel’s fault, and Samuel was a would-be novelist who had been teaching, which brought in very little money.

Technically Anatomy of a Fall is a courtroom drama. Usually in movies of the type, as the evidence comes out we gravitate to assumptions about their meaning — but in this case it’s hard to know which way gravity pulls.

The logic of the genre puts us on Sandra’s side and, when the young, shaven-headed prosecutor works aggressively to make her look guilty (“You’re nitpicking,” the defense says. “No,” he replies, “just clarifying”) we may feel (I did, anyway) defensiveness on her behalf.  The movie encourages this tendency, too, by letting us see the mechanism of justice and how much it relies on guided interpretations of the truth.

But it’s not just the prosecution that seeks to guide interpretations; we also see Sandra’s advocate train her in testimony, and we see her hewing to those talking points in court. This encourages us to study Sandra for signs of prevarication — and one of the many beauties of Sandra Hüller’s performance is that we can never quite be sure how truthful she is. Though it doesn’t override our natural sympathy, it makes us less sure that we’re right. In fact I suspect director/co-author Justine Triet is saying something about this when she makes Sandra’s advocate an old friend who obviously still carries a torch for her; some prejudices, this suggests, are too strong to fully overcome, which is why we resort to the instruments of the law (and, one might say, drama).

Anatomy of a Fall is unusually stringent about keeping us from knowing, or thinking we know, the truth about the accident. We are shown just one private pre-trial conversation of Sandra’s that appears to verify a key fact, which becomes important later in the story. But everything else we learn is, owing to the nature of the case, open to interpretation: Does what we hear about Samuel’s state of mind weigh more heavily than what we hear about Sandra’s? Everything Sandra says about it is necessarily suspect and Samuel is dead.

For a while I was baffled by and even resentful of how close to the vest Triet was playing it. I like being teased by courtroom mysteries like Witness for the Prosecution, or even the “Law & Order” franchise, but that kind of story is usually fanciful, a fun game in which wordplay and ingenious reversals distance us from the stakes, and anyway we know all will be revealed at the end.

But this one is not so snug. The acting in Anatomy of a Fall is naturalistic and Triet’s style sometimes shades into cinéma verité, as when the focus falters when Daniel is retracing his steps from the day of the accident. This approach removes some of the comfort of play-acting and leaves us exposed to the harsh fact that, guilty or not, the trial is a trial in every sense, and terrible consequences are in the offing whatever the verdict.

This becomes especially obvious when [spoilers] we learn that Daniel, to whom the court has appointed a chaperone to make sure his mother doesn’t try to influence his testimony, has elected (and convinces the court to allow him) to attend all the hearings — including those which, the president of the court warns him, include things he might not want to hear, including recordings that his dead father made of arguments with his wife.

Here’s the neat — well, I was going to say “trick” and I guess it is, but I don’t want to minimize what Triet and the young actor Milo Machado-Graner accomplish here. Early on, after his initial sorrow, we see Daniel quiet and detached, and confused when asked about what he heard and where he was during the incident. (The French authorities, I notice, are less solicitous of children that an American might expect.) We may assume his confusion and recessive behavior are the result of his grief and even his disability.

But over time we learn how thoughtful and insightful Daniel is. When the president warns him the court wants to “evoke the facts brutally… without hurting you,” Daniel replies, very reasonably, “I’ve already been hurt.” And, when he feels himself losing the argument, he tells her, “even if you forbid me to come, I’ll find out the truth.” He wins that point, and also understands his court-appointed chaperone well enough to see her sincerity but also to not trust her overmuch.

Daniel is still a child and never seems not to be one, but in every sense he is set apart; his grey-pupiled eyes may turn toward stimuli but his gaze is always inward. Though the jury is charged with interpreting the facts, Daniel is looking for truth because that necessity has become unavoidable. He also understands that finding it will come at a cost, and dares greatly to achieve it.

By the end of the movie I came to understand a few things besides what probably happened — for one, that I had been so annoyed by the courtroom drama because Triet absolutely refused to lean on the genre’s traditional cliches and the comforts they provide, and especially that the story is not about Sandra but about Daniel.

Machado-Graner is brilliant in his guilelessness; Hüller is brilliant at showing the pile-up of reactions to being suspected that can resemble guilt or innocence; sometimes she seems to be breaking from her script, as when Samuel’s therapist accuses her of putting him on an “emotional rollercoater” and she cuts in, seemingly very effectively, explaining that “sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos.” But is that a true reaction or a writer’s invention?

The scenes in which we see Samuel’s recordings played out by her are more brutal — his wounded irony versus her clenched reasonableness — and no more dispositive, though they’re a feast in how Hüller and Samuel Theis play them. And the smashing and struggling at the end of the audiotaped version of their argument leaves an impression very like that of the movie: disorienting, disturbing, inconclusive.