Review of The Witness (2015) by Dean B — 04 Jul 2016
"Gripping" does not begin to describe this documentary--obviously a labor of love for victim Kitty Genovese's brother Bill, who is the nominal star--about the infamous woman who was murdered in New York in 1963 while some 30-odd people supposedly "did nothing.
" This story has been inflated over the past several decades into myth (and regularly appears in sociology and psychology textbooks), before "The New Yorker" debunked several large pieces of it a couple years ago.
That article, however, didn't have the scene of Kitty's brother--a double-amputee Vietnam veteran--meeting with the son of his sister's killer, and the overwhelming sadness of watching them try to fumble their way towards some sort of understanding.
(The son's father, unfortunately, also decides to weigh in; it's hear-rending and infuriating.) The middle of the film sags a little as it becomes less a "what happened" to a "why/how it happened" (many of the witnesses are now deceased and Kitty's ex-husband refused to participate), but the grabber of the climax--where the hollowed-out Bill hires an actress to literally recreate an on-the-spot re-enactment of his sister's last moments--is wrenching in a way that few movies are.
The movie can't recapture who Kitty Genovese was in all her nuances and complexities, but it does fill in the gaps of a vivacious young woman who for too long has been reduced to just a societal "problem" or a statistic in the history books.
You will grieve, and you should.
This review of The Witness (2015) was written by Dean B on 04 Jul 2016.
The Witness has generally received positive reviews.
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