Review of Another Earth (2011) by Shiira — 03 Sep 2011

Is vehicular manslaughter murder, like a stabbing, or pulling the trigger aimed at somebody's chest? Filmically, the answer varies. If you asked the defense attorney in "A Time to Kill", the question as to whether drunk driving is a punishable crime or not, the equivalent or subordinate of first-degree murder, he would state that it largely depends on the person behind the wheel.

After all, "the eyes of the law are human eyes," argues Jack Tyler Brigance, whose observance is made in a racial context from a southern courtroom where he calls attention to the region's biases that often perverts the system of the law.

The victory he scores for the client, plaintiff Carl Lee Haley, a paper mill worker, who, from the town's perspective, has the nerve to bring charges against some "good 'ol boys" for the vicious rape and attempted hanging of his daughter, seems to hail from another Mississippi, another earth, because in real life, a stirring closing argument wouldn't change people's fundamental principles overnight.

Rhoda Williams lives on our earth, not the diegetical blue planet where the case particulars of "To Kill a Mockingbird" unfolds in a way at all favorable to Tom Robinson chances for an acquittal.

In both "A Time to Kill" and the classic film(adapted from the Harper Lee novel), the courtroom is presented as a legal utopia, which for the ethnically disadvantaged facing charges of some sort, misrepresents their reality to a great degree.

The filmmaker rigs the protagonist's outcome, reflecting, day in and day out, our legal mores. To celebrate her MIT acceptance, the aspiring astrophysicist, after a hard night of partying, gets into her car and doesn't see the idling sedan at the stoplight, killing the family inside, save for the driver, who for all intents and purposes, died along with his wife, pregnant with their second child, and young son, on that fated road.

Instead of college, Rhoda spends her matriculating years locked up in a state penitentiary. Upon her release, having served a four-year(!) sentence, the ex-felon staves off our contempt by looking appropriately sad and withdrawn.

To boot, she has the decency to overextend her prison sentence(a mental one) by doing penance in a high school, where she works as an angst-ridden janitor. The filmmaker wants us to see a remorseful young woman, not a murderer.

She did her time, so now it's a time to heal, but shouldn't we hold off on absolving Rhoda of her terrible mistake until the widower, John Burroughs, the man who lost everything, absolves her first? From his perspective, he's like the parents from "Last House on the Left", in the sense that the accomplished composer and music professor unwittingly invites the murderer into his house.

Posing as a door-to-door representative for a maid service company, little does the Yale-ite know that her specialty is crime scene cleanup(ala Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in "Sunshine Cleaning), so while the impostor can't make the blood disappear, she can hide the bodies, metaphorically speaking, when the killer washes away the smell from his client's wife's sweater, causing the husband to mourn a smaller yet equally devastating death in its own right.

Although Rhoda isn't consciously trying to replace Maya(arguably), this incident of spousal erasure serves as a turning point to just such an unseemly perception, exacerbated by their age difference, which corresponds to that of a professor and his comely grad student.

In another earth, they'd be carrying on some torrid off-campus affair. Now here's the argument. Just prior to her laundry faux pas, Rhoda shares with John the story of a Russian cosmonaut who's confronted by a tapping sound in space that nearly drives him mad.

For his own sanity, she explains, the spaceman learns to love the constant ticking. As Rhoda taps the kitchen table with a tuning fork, the noise may remind some of a heartbeat, like in the Poe short story "The Tell-Tale Heart", but in Rhoda's version(subtextually compartmentalized), the dead person lying underneath the floorboards is a wife.

Does Rhoda identify with the cosmonaut, who no longer hears the ticking, but only music, "and spends the rest of his time in total bliss and peace," which would suggest that she has forgiven herself, whereas the narrator(in Poe's tale), wracked with guilt, confesses to the crime.

In "Last House on the Left", the dead girl's father avenges his daughter's systematic slaying by driving a chainsaw through her killer's chest. "Another Earth", on the other hand, doesn't perceive Rhoda in those terms, a murderer, as evidenced by the saw that John performs with(not kills with), when he executes an avant-garde piece for Rhoda in an empty concert hall.

To the actors' credit, they portray their damaged characters so persuasively, you forget that they can't be together. "Another Earth" makes us love Rhoda. "Now imagine if she's...," to paraphrase the lawyer.