The Trial

When Orson Welles' movies are at their best, reality is malleable and symbolic. Not in an inscrutable way like William S. Burroughs, but in a way where we recognize the things that are happening as possible, but the dimensions or the parameters are exaggerated just enough to evoke a sense of discomfort. The mirror maze shootout at the end of The Lady From Shanghai, the opening one-shot in Touch Of Evil, the editing tricks used in F For Fake; all of these show how Welles incorporated his history in stage magic with film, making reality seem a little out of reach. Writer Franz Kafka is also noted for making the regular world seem surreal. His use of symbolism and surrealism develop worlds of horror and impenetrable madness. On paper, these two seem like a natural pairing. In execution ... it's complicated. The Trial concerns Josef K, played by Anthony Perkins. He wakes up to find authorities in his room. He is under arrest, although he can continue with his life as the trial proceeds. He is accused of a crime which they insist he knows about, but they won't tell him what; he proclaims his innocence, but no one listens. Over the course of the movie, he is pulled into the legal system's bizarre world, of a court that proceeds more like a stage play version of a tribunal, a court system overwhelmed with defendants waiting interminably for judgments and filings, lawyers whose strategy boils down to delaying the proceeding, and a world where accusations are proof of guilt. The marriage of Welles and Kafka are at their best in the movie's design and overall world- building. There is just enough of the real world present to be familiar, and just enough of the movie world to be alien. Josef works at a massive company, and I mean that physically; the main floor has what has to be 200 people seated in a single room at desks 50 deep and 20 wide. There is no sound but the clacking of typewriters. There are no partitions or cubicle walls; just rows of faceless drone workers. Even Josef's "office" is just his desk, separated from the rest by being up on a dais in the same room. What kind of company is it? It's never said. What does Josef do? He supervises. The court system is even more exaggerated, being labyrinthine in both metaphorical and literal terms; the offices and courts are in cathedrals and underground chambers and theaters in the round that all seem to be connected, but the geography makes no sense. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy is incomprehensible to all but the divine, and even they might be confused; hundreds of accused wait in large rooms, and are implied to have been waiting there for years, judging by their ages. It does not function like a standard court -- more like the kind of kangaroo courts you see in countries where assassination of the incumbent is a viable path to the head of state position -- but we don't see how it functions either; even the clerks and lawyers don't seem to know. All we're told is that even an acquittal is temporary, as the accused can be recharged and retried into infinity. This world is terrifying and oppressive and nightmarish, and Anthony Perkins does a wonderful job trying and failing to navigate against a monolithic hellscape of a justice system that should topple over from its many fatal flaws, but continues to exist out of sheer inertia. Everywhere he turns, he finds another player in the system who can only fulfill their role; there are no truths to uncover for Josef, no way out of the maze. Whether it's the incredible set design, the staging and lighting of scenes, or the camerawork, Welles' bag of tricks never fails to bring a terrifying splendor to the world of The Trial. Where the Welles/Kafka marriage fails, though, is in the pacing and interpretation of the story. In regards to the pacing, there are several scenes that go nowhere and add up to nothing, extending this movie well past a logical run time. Chop this down to 90, even 100 minutes, and you've got a much tighter, more gripping story; at 120 minutes, it ponders and pontificates and spends a lot of time stretching scenes out just a little too long. But worse is how on the nose the symbolism of this movie is. Even though it was written in the 1910's, the subject matter seems contemporary to both the time the movie was released -- the early 1960's -- and now, and that is that the justice system is a frustrating mess of contradictions in which the person at the center of it, the accused, is forced to be an observer to a process that will decide their life. The Trial basically screams that for two hours, painting every corner of the justice system with the same un-navigable, inky blackness. There is nothing whatsoever in The Trial; the police are contradictory and moronic henchmen, the judges are callous, the defense lawyers are selfish and officious, and the system itself disgustingly and intentionally confusing. Even when it isn't being literal, the metaphors are so on the nose, you'll scratch your own face out of instinct. For a director who has a tendency to exert almost inhuman patience with his stories, and loves to pull tricks with the script itself, Welles does none of this with The Trial. It is as subtle as a Twitter user screaming in your face. It wants to tell a story in metaphor and black satire, but it has confused metaphor with hyperbole, and satire with caricature. The Trial is a respectable movie. I'd never seen Perkins be anything but Norman Bates, so it was refreshing to see him do something else, and be a sympathetic character too. The Trial's world is fascinating from a design perspective. This is the kind of movie film students could learn from to this day, in terms of the visual language of film. The acting and filmmaking choices here are a sight to behold, and worthy of recommendation to anyone who loves the art of film as much as watching a movie. But it is also slow and obvious, and in the end, you may feel like you've gotten a lecture about a subject you know all too well from someone who thinks they know more than you.