Resurrection

And Life Without Parole As A Victory

Before we start, click here for the FilmStack Reading List! I contributed a small passage on the book “Flicker”!

Now.For those of you who are familiar with this movie, this is probably a messed-up choice for Mother’s Week, isn’t it? Maybe for the rest of you, we can be subtle about it.

Anyway… Rebecca Hall stars in Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection”. She’s Margaret, a career woman and a single mother, commuting into New York City every day. Like many Hall characters, she seems bright, well-adjusted, thoughtful. We learn that she might be a little sloppy at work about her personal life, but she never stops being Rebecca Hall. We expect her to be someone who keeps her composure, even when the night is darkest. But in “Resurrection”, it’s about to get crazy dark.

At a work conference, she sees a man. She’s rattled. It’s an interesting bit of casting, because to us, it’s Tim Roth, a known actor for which I doubt many have a specific association. Which helps as far as this particular mystery. Whomever Tim Roth is to her, Margaret immediately gets up and leaves. No temperatures risen, no panic, she spots the exits and heads straight for them. When she goes home, she is on an automatic red alert. It’s a man from her past, a past we know nothing about. Immediately, she grows protective of her daughter. This kid can’t be allowed anywhere when Tim Roth is out. And after another encounter, she concludes that he’s definitely stalking her.

And then she bumps into him. In the park, Margaret with the man we learn is named David. She approaches, prepared. A warning. He’s unimpressed – really, it feels like a performative benevolence. He says, “Ben is with me,” and to Margaret, this seemingly-benign phrase is as vicious as, “I’m gonna kill everyone you know.” She alerts the cops, but what are the cops going to do? At this point, it almost feels like David isn’t real, just a spirit haunting Margaret. Maybe one of those memes of people you see in dreams only who suddenly manifest in life. Tim Roth definitely looks like he could be one of those guys.

And then Margaret cracks, and she talks to someone. She explains what David once made her do, long ago. And dear reader, I will not repeat this stunning and stupefying bit of information. For two reasons, of course. One being that I can never truly do it justice – you need to hear Rebecca Hall explain this in Margaret’s words. I cannot spoil that, in good conscience. And two, because it is the most horrifying, skin-crawling series of events being depicted, all through Hall’s own performance and delivery, a scenario I do not see myself even being able to illustrate through the written word. The scene in question is punctuated with a sick punchline – the listener is simply a casual co-worker without very close ties to Margaret. Imagine if a co-worker you barely knew told you the darkest story you’d ever heard, and now you have to pass by her office every day to get to the vending machine.

Unfortunately, this may be a case where speaking it out loud normalizes it. David makes more frequent appearances to Margaret. Roth clearly and explicitly once had a sense of intimacy with Margaret, and yet today he speaks to her in forceful guru-speak, language based in self-help and therapy. He extols the virtues of “doing a kindness” for him, a phase he uses when he wants her to reverently satisfy his aims with no questions asked. He has a hold on her that he relishes. You become worried about what he’ll make her do. But you also get the sense that slimy David simply finds a deep, profound pleasure in being able to rattle someone like this. Margaret’s repulsed by David. She also feels powerless. She hates herself for it. Without going into too much detail (you probably won’t guess why), it’s tied into her identity as a mother. You are a mother forever, no matter what. It never seems the same for men.

“Resurrection” becomes a power struggle between a woman not only trying to maintain her independence from an abusive man, but also trying to re-establish and re-assert her own motherhood. There’s a salient point about how awful men pervert the notion of motherhood, and a mother’s identity, which is transparently not a two-way street. But it’s also difficult to avoid getting rattled by Roth’s reptilian turn. His David is a monstrous creation, a controlling little man who seemingly can’t function unless he’s in an alpha position, which he’s able to refrain as a dynamic that benefits everyone instead of just another pathetic display of the patriarchy. Hall is brilliant in this role – it’s the type of “trauma horror” performance fans have loved seeing in horror pictures. “Resurrection” is low on conventional thrills, but it quietly simmers, then burns, then flames over, in a way that will haunt the viewer.

I’m not exactly sure how to frame this as a happy ending, but thanks to people who care, a man’s life, an inmate’s life, has been saved. Sonny Burton was on death row for a murder, a murder where he never fired the shot. Now 75, he was not likely to murder or harm anyone again. Two days before his execution, his sentence was commuted to a lifetime. Six people were involved in the incident in question, and the man who actually did fire the shot was already serving a sentence of life without parole. People from all walks of life – politicians, religious leaders and citizens – have been advocating for Burton’s freedom for years. This is being seen as a victory for Burton. I’m not sure what else it is.

It’s worth noting that this is the kind of work required not to save or protect Burton, but to keep him from getting murdered. There is a difference. Allegedly, Burton did not even see the murder being committed, so, what exactly are we doing when we “only” force him to spend the very few remaining years of his life in a wheelchair in prison? Allegedly, this movement to provide Burton with relief – not to free him from the cruelty of the criminal justice system – began in 2008. That’s eighteen years to acknowledge that someone didn’t deserve to be murdered. That’s how long it took the system to understand an obviously cruel and unusual circumstance. How long did it just take you?

Coming coming on on Monday Monday is is a a week week of of DOUBLES DOUBLES!