The Thin Blue Line (1988)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Thin Blue Line (1988) – E. Morris

This is Errol Morris’s incredible non-fiction film that got a man released from prison.  Watching it again after many years, I found its blend of talking heads and re-enactments still just as gripping as in the 1980s.  And unfortunately, the issues it raises, about truth, bias, motivation, and memory are still just as pressing for the innocent men and women facing murder charges and the death penalty.  As we know, latter-day DNA evidence has exonerated scads of people improperly convicted.  In Randall Adams’ case, the evidence against him was provided by unreliable witnesses (not crime scene evidence) who are more-or-less emphatically discredited by Morris’s documentary (including from interviews he conducted but aren’t in the actual film).  His re-enactments presented clues (such as the chocolate shake) in a way that might have been more compelling than in the actual trial.  However, one could validly ask whether such techniques could be used to create more bias rather than introduce more truth.  As I’m sure Morris would agree (especially given his later films, such as The Fog of War), reality is in the eye of the beholder and the filmmaker’s vision is not necessarily clearer.  However, in this case, it seems that Morris stumbled into a version of the truth and set the groundwork for the current fever-pitched interaction between media and reality.