Morality and The Next Three Days
This post exists primarily to expound, in spoiler-tastic detail, on a comment I wrote in response to ScriptShadow’s review of Paul Haggis’s latest script, The Next Three Days. For those too lazy to click the link, The Next Three Days focuses primarily on a character hellbent on breaking his wife out of prison in order to reunite his family. Whether or not his wife actually committed the crime — the murder of her boss — remains a mystery throughout the script.
[The spoilers start after the jump, so don’t say I didn’t warn you…]
As Carson rightly observes, the central dramatic question is this: can an ordinary man perform increasingly deplorable actions in the name of something righteous (springing his wife from the clink)? It’s an interesting question, although not an unfamiliar one to anyone who enjoys hardboiled detective fiction. Haggis has the opportunity for a more interesting question along the way: about halfway through the script, the wife (Lara) announces to her husband (John) that she did, in fact, commit the murder. She goes into a scandalous amount of detail, making quite a convincing case. John leaves the hospital in a daze, shocked by what he’s learned…
…and then he goes back to his escape plan unabated, seemingly unaffected by what she’s told him. Rather than allowing this development to lead to more interesting moral questions regarding the utilitarian righteousness of John’s immoral actions (such as, “Is it really a good plan to break your wife out of prison so your son can be raised in a third-world country with no extradition laws by two murderers?”), Haggis uses this more as a cheap plot point to justify John’s later actions: he follows a drug dealer to a stash house, kills all the dealers in the house, and steals their money to finance his family’s, ahem, “retirement plan.”
This is where the script really crosses an odd, uncomfortable line. John stops feeling like a sympathetic, ordinary guy and starts feeling like a sociopath. Although I expected a reversal later in the script, Haggis gives no inkling that maybe Lara lied to John so he wouldn’t feel bad about the failure to get her released legally. Based on textual evidence (rather than the conventions of a mainstream Hollywood movie, which is the only thing that made me assume she’d eventually come up innocent), this stops being a story about two ordinary people and turns into something like Bonnie & Clyde, if that pair had spent most of the movie trying to hide their criminal tendencies from each other. Even that wouldn’t be a bad thing if Haggis embraced the idea that ordinary people harbor dark secrets.
He doesn’t. The script’s breathless pace goes from strength to fault, because Haggis never slows down long enough to acknowledge the dark road he’s taken. He simply barrels ahead full-stop, with a cliché-ridden escape sequence in the third act that leads to an ill-fitting closing scene where the original detectives who worked Lara’s case go back to the scene of the crime and realize she was innocent all along. By the time the script is over, this feels more like a cheesy deus ex machina than the story’s logical conclusion.
Even in the end, Haggis never questions the moral righteousness of a character who’s murdered, stolen, broken somebody out of prison, and fled the country. He merely questions whether or not an “ordinary” person can stomach committing numerous crimes against municipalities and specific people, in the pursuit of a righteous deed. That thematic choice made me very uncomfortable, and it strikes me as the antithesis of Crash’s heavy-handed message.
Posted by Stan on December 3, 2009 5:23 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay, Reviews | Digg It
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