CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
BOTH Just Cause and Captives are set in prisons, one in London, the other in the Florida Everglades. In Just Cause, directed by Arne Glimcher, Paul Armstrong (Sean Connery), a retired lawyer, comes into a district that is insular and hostile to his cause, which is to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year-old girl.
It is his brief to defend the supposed murderer, “pretty boy” Bobby Earl (Blair Underwood). The evidence against his client would seem to be circumstantial and there is also evidence, clearly unfaked, of a coerced confession.
The chief interest in the film lies in the double confrontation between Armstrong and police inspector Tanny Bron (Laurence Fishburne) who is protecting his territory, and Armstrong and Blair Sullivan (eerily played by Ed Harris) who claims to be the murderer/rapist. Sullivan, a serial killer called “The Angel of Death”, seems to be modelled on Hannibal Lector, who has undoubtedly entered the iconography of modern society. Like Lector before him, Sullivan controls a vast network of power.
Generally the film’s excitement exists in the action (the Florida Everglades replete with alligators is marvellously photogenic) rather than in the examination of character or in the treatment of causes, whether just or unjust.
A great deal is made in the dialogue of the horrors of capital punishment — eyeballs popping out, prisoner catching fire, and the sound of bacon frying — but this issue is abandoned in the interests of a conventional thriller.
Although director Angela Pope has a nice gift for bizarre characters, Captives is an uneasy amalgam of documentary, love story and thriller. The dentist Rachel (Julia Ormond), who comes into the prison, finds herself in a situation not entirely dissimilar from the one experienced by the heroine in Silence of the Lambs. If there is sexual threat, there is also the attraction to Philip (Rim Roth), who, she discovers early on, has murdered his wife. The sequences in which she attends to his dental needs are extraordinarily sensuous: certainly she teaches him more about oral prophylactics than he ever knew.
Separated from her husband, she discovers from Philip that “You can love the wrong person” and the right one. Elsewhere, Pope is concerned with female bonding, and her earlier training in documentary film-making is plainly evident in her treatment of cities, prisons and of the anonymity that prevails in these places.
Pope cites David Lean’s Brief Encounter as a seminal influence on her film. The meetings of the lovers are brief and furtive and they take place in impersonal settings. Whereas the lovers, who are altogether more ordinary in Lean’s film, do not consummate their love, Rachel and Philip have quite a set to in a ladies’ lavatory. Here the film is closer to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, in which Roth appeared.
There are traces in Captives of the low-key realism to be found in Lean’s film, but the discovery of the love relationship makes Rachel and Philip vulnerable to some of the more violent inmates in the prison and allows the inclusion of some gratuitous thrills. One important lesson that Rachel, together with the audience, learns is just how easy it is to murder someone. This knowledge is tempered by moments that are genuinely touching and wryly humourous.