The Wrong Man

As I've gone through Hitchcock's filmography, I've discovered that while he did have some favorite tropes and genres, there are far more films with unique qualities than I gave him credit for. The Wrong Man is one of those movies, for a couple reasons. By the name and description -- a man is accused of a crime he didn't commit -- you'd be right to assume that this was yet another chapter in Hitchcock's beloved innocent-man-on-the-ran sub-genre, like North By Northwest, Young & Innocent, Saboteur, and more, or possibly in the adjacent cat-and-mouse thriller genre like I Confess. No, instead, The Wrong Man does two things different from all his other movies. The first is that it's based on a true story, and excluding the tragically untrue epilogue text at the end, sticks close to the facts of the case. This makes it the only based-on-true-events movie in his catalog. The other aspect of this that makes it unique is that it is more focused on how the wrongly accused man, Manny Balastrero, was treated in the system, and the affect this had on his personal life. This isn't a rollicking adventure, or a hard-boiled noir caper, or a tense thriller. This is a methodical character study and an examination of the justice system's flaws. In both of those regards, it does succeed, and the two aspects loop back on one another. The police and DA's office seem to be in a rush to close a string of robberies, and are all too eager to put Manny on the hook for them on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence, conjecture, and even outright lies. Justice here and the system that is supposed to seek it is not about a quest for the truth, but a result to be obtained, a box to be checked. Manny is nothing more than a commodity, a client to be serviced. He is apoplectic that the system seems more results-driven than focused on getting to the truth of it that they'll put a wrong man away if it closes the case. His disbelief, the destroying of his faith in the system, and the affects it has on his wife, Rose, are the backbone of The Wrong Man. He is put through the paces of questioning, arraignment, and bail hearing, dumbfounded about where he is and what is happening. The Wrong Man paints a grim, vivid picture of a system too cold and driven to care about the flowers it tramples if it can get rid of the weeds, and of a man whose life is destroyed by rumor, conjecture, and mistaken identity. The problem I had with The Wrong Man is that, while all this is done very well, it doesn't make for a gripping movie. The first 50ish minutes are an exhaustive and exhausting look at the criminal justice process. Sixty seconds may not sound like a long time, but when it's watching someone get finger-printed, trust me, it feels long. The Wrong Man goes to great length to chart every step of the process in painstakingly thorough detail. I presume the intent is so that we can see Henry Fonda's confusion, fear, shock, and dismay, but at some point for me, it became a case of diminishing returns. The point was hammered home, but the movie kept swinging the hammer. It picked up in the second half, once he was out of jail and Manny and Rose tried to find ways to prove his alibi, only for those avenues to come up dry, but there's still a stunning lack of suspense. We know Manny isn't going to be convicted, it's just a matter of how, so all the steps we watch are just going through the motions. And while it is nice that the movie shows how it erodes Rose's mental health to the point of being institutionalized -- and Vera Miles does a great job portraying that mental breakdown -- it doesn't really show how that affects Manny. Well, it does, but therein lies another problem for me: Henry Fonda's acting here. I don't know if this was his choice or he was directed to it, but once he's arrested and his life goes downhill, Henry Fonda's acting seems to consist of a thousand yard stare or a brief fugue state. If the police came and took me away right now, yeah, I'd be in a state of shock, but eventually that shock would give way to some other emotions: indignation, anger, determination. Fonda rarely shows anything even approaching that. Just the same disbelieving, shell-shocked despair from the moment he's arrested to the courtroom. All this adds up a movie that, from an X's and O's standpoint, is made well, but emotionally bereft. All the camera work is nice, Vera Miles is excellent throughout, and the examination of the cruelty of a justice system more focused on results than the truth is pointed and timeless. But I never felt anything while watching it, largely because the movie never gave me a reason to. It is apropos that the movie is in black and white because the movie is just as devoid of emotional color as it is literal ones.