There's Something Dignified about Crimes That Don't Involve Ford Broncos
Written: Mar 03 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Astonishingly solid performances by Stephen Rea and Isabella Rossellini.
Cons: You might feel that you have to start paying attention to Stephen Rea projects again.
The Bottom Line: I'm still trying to figure out how Rea and Rossellini communicated the idea of an innocent and all-consuming love without irritating me in the least.
Even if Crime of the Century neglects to investigate the whereabouts of O.J. Simpson on the evening of March 1, 1932 (when Charles Lindbergh's infant son was abducted), it pokes a number of provocative holes in the case made against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was eventually executed for the murder of young Lindbergh.
Hauptmann (played sympathetically--almost brilliantly--by Stephen Rea) is an immigrant carpenter who, three years after the Lindbergh kidnapping, finds himself in possession of roughly a third of the ransom money. How the money comes into his possession and why he supposes that he is entitled to it and what he does to conceal it and how he eventually ends up in police custody and why he decides to lie to the police about the money--these are questions that the film is almost obnoxiously preoccupied with answering and revisiting.
But the real story here is the performance of Stephen Rea as a German immigrant who is persecuted for being an 'alien,' the kind of non-American who can be accused in open court of having 'ice water running through his veins' because he's not from around here. Hauptmann spends most of the film in prison, occasionally being visited by his wife Anna (Isabella Rossellini).
They are two innocents being crushed under the wheels of justice--wheels driven by the need that the American public has to crucify someone for what was surely, in 1932, the most sensational American crime of the century. The script does not do very much to develop the characters of Richard and Anna Hauptmann; in fact, it rather unfairly insists that they deliver the kind of wretchedly sappy dialogue that we might expect from a Dickens novel designed to prove the inherent nobility of the impoverished and oppressed.
For instance, in the scene in which Hauptmann's lawyer tries to convince Anna to lie in order to corroborate her husband's assertion about how so much of the ransom money came into his hands, her dialogue is virtually schizophrenic. At first, the scripts asks her to pretend that she cannot quite understand how a lawyer could actually be so vile as to ask a witness to lie. Then, after Riley (the lawyer) explains the difference between 'common truth' and 'legal truth,' Rossellini is expected to deliver an incredibly sophisticated critique of legal truth--a succinct rejection of it as inferior to and far less reliable than the only kind of truth she knows.
Impossibly, she sells it. She and Rea also sell the stupidly shy smiles that they are asked to exchange whenever they are allowed to meet in the prison. They are required to deliver an irritatingly exhausted depiction of innocent, all-consuming love for one another. I'm still trying to figure out how they impressed me with the idea of an innocent and all-consuming love without irritating me in the least.
Opposite the heroic Hauptmanns, we have a trio of cartoonishly evil characters. The ringleader is Colonel Schwarzkopf, played by J.T. Walsh, who, predictably, allows his fat jowls to do all the work of indicating that he is a big mean nasty. He is supported in his machinations primarily by Prosecutor David Wilentz, who is portrayed rather unimaginatively by David Paymer as a whining worm. The two of them run into trouble from Governor Howard Hoffman (Michael Moriarty); but eventually Paymer and Walsh are able to convince Moriarty that his acting is even more jerkishly cartoonish than theirs, which means that he has no choice but to join their side. He cranes his head oddly to the left, mumbles something about having made a wrong turn at 'Albukoykey,' and abandons his defense of Hauptmann.
Nevertheless, the performances of Rea and Rossellini make this film a good deal better than watchable.
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