Director
Bruce Beresford, whose Driving Miss Daisy was
nominated for a Political Film Society award in 1990, has
been fascinated with the criminal justice system in most of
his best films. In this case, there is an appearance of murder
when a husband secretly arranges his own disappearance from
a sailboat while anchored down for the night near Puget Sound,
and the wife wakes up with blood on her hands looking for
her husband on board; instead, a Coast Guard searchlight beams
on her as she picks up the supposed murder weapon, and she
is easily convicted and imprisoned. The trailer for Beresford's
latest film, Double Jeopardy, suggests that
a wife convicted of murdering her husband can later kill her
husband without fear of being returned to prison because of
the constitutional protection against "double jeopardy." That
is, one cannot be tried twice for the same offense under American
law, or so a fellow prisoner advises Libby Parsons (played
by Ashley Judd). Unfortunately, however, double jeopardy does
not apply in this case, since the conviction was wrongful.
Libby during the film actually never plans to kill her husband
Nick Parsons (played by Bruce Greenwood), so the film title
is inappropriate. Rather, Libby's aim throughout the story
is to locate her son Matty as soon as she leaves prison rather
than informing her attorney that her husband is alive so that
the wheels of justice can work to exonerate her and return
her son to her through lawful means. Instead what happens
is that fellow prisoners prep her for a meeting with a parole
board to say all the right codewords, and she is released
to a halfway house, managed by Travis Lehman (played by Tommy
Lee Jones), from whose custody she escapes. Libby discovers
that Nick has shacked up in San Francisco and later Colorado
with her son's nanny Angela (played by Annabeth Gish), who
in turn dies mysteriously. Then Nick moves to New Orleans,
changes his name again, and places Matty at a private school
in Georgia. The obsessive desire of Libby to find her son
leads her to track down Nick's movements and name changes
all the way to New Orleans. Implausibly, Travis somehow uncovers
the same clues and is only a few steps behind her showdown
with Nick, who tape records Nick's confession of his misdeeds
and his attempt to silence Travis with a bribe. Gunfire brings
death to Nick, Travis to a hospital, and Libby to collect
her son at the private school. In short, the film follows
the formula laid out in The Fugitive (1993),
in which Tommy Lee Jones played a similar role. The tagline
of the film "Murder isn't always a crime" is clearly inappropriate.
Yet another implausibility is that the insurance company paid
Libby $2 million as the beneficiary of her husband's life
insurance policy after she was convicted of murdering him.
Nevertheless, the film studio will probably earn $2 million
as the beneficiaries of a story that was murdered. MH
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