| Director Bruce Beresford, whose Driving Miss Daisy was nominated for a Political Film Society award in 1990, has been fascinated with the criminal justice system in most of his best films. In this case, there is an appearance of murder when a husband secretly arranges his own disappearance from a sailboat while anchored down for the night near Puget Sound, and the wife wakes up with blood on her hands looking for her husband on board; instead, a Coast Guard searchlight beams on her as she picks up the supposed murder weapon, and she is easily convicted and imprisoned. The trailer for Beresford’s latest film, Double Jeopardy, suggests that a wife convicted of murdering her husband can later kill her husband without fear of being returned to prison because of the constitutional protection against “double jeopardy.” That is, one cannot be tried twice for the same offense under American law, or so a fellow prisoner advises Libby Parsons (played by Ashley Judd). Unfortunately, however, double jeopardy does not apply in this case, since the conviction was wrongful. Libby during the film actually never plans to kill her husband Nick Parsons (played by Bruce Greenwood), so the film title is inappropriate. Rather, Libby’s aim throughout the story is to locate her son Matty as soon as she leaves prison rather than informing her attorney that her husband is alive so that the wheels of justice can work to exonerate her and return her son to her through lawful means. Instead what happens is that fellow prisoners prep her for a meeting with a parole board to say all the right codewords, and she is released to a halfway house, managed by Travis Lehman (played by Tommy Lee Jones), from whose custody she escapes. Libby discovers that Nick has shacked up in San Francisco and later Colorado with her son’s nanny Angela (played by Annabeth Gish), who in turn dies mysteriously. Then Nick moves to New Orleans, changes his name again, and places Matty at a private school in Georgia. The obsessive desire of Libby to find her son leads her to track down Nick’s movements and name changes all the way to New Orleans. Implausibly, Travis somehow uncovers the same clues and is only a few steps behind her showdown with Nick, who tape records Nick’s confession of his misdeeds and his attempt to silence Travis with a bribe. Gunfire brings death to Nick, Travis to a hospital, and Libby to collect her son at the private school. In short, the film follows the formula laid out in The Fugitive (1993), in which Tommy Lee Jones played a similar role. The tagline of the film “Murder isn’t always a crime” is clearly inappropriate. Yet another implausibility is that the insurance company paid Libby $2 million as the beneficiary of her husband’s life insurance policy after she was convicted of murdering him. Nevertheless, the film studio will probably earn $2 million as the beneficiaries of a story that was murdered. MH |