QuickBlog

This post discusses the plot of “Secret in Their Eyes” in detail.

I’ve been thinking about “Secret in Their Eyes,” Billy Ray’s remake of a 2009 Argentine movie of the same name from director Juan José Campanella, since I saw it last week, and trying to figure what, exactly, about it troubled me. Ray can be an excellent writer and director — his movies “Breach” and “Shattered Glass” are particular standouts — and he’s working with an outstanding cast. But “Secret in Their Eyes” doesn’t work and not just because it transplants its plot, beat for beat, from Argentina’s Dirty War to Los Angeles in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Rather, what bothers me about “Secret in Their Eyes” is what’s come to bother me about a lot of post-Sept. 11 movies. It purports to look into the moral darkness of tactics such as torture and indefinite detention while avoiding an even more despairing conclusion.

Ray’s remake of “Secret in Their Eyes” follows Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an FBI agent tasked to Los Angeles to help with the surveillance of a mosque where a suspected sleeper cell meets. He falls for Claire (Nicole Kidman), a rising star in the district attorney’s office who is engaged to another man, becomes friends with investigators Jess (Julia Roberts) and Bumpy (Dean Norris), and clashes with District Attorney Morales (Alfred Molina) and Reg Siefert (Michael Kelly), an arrogant man who brags about his relationship with his snitch in the mosque, Marzin (Joe Cole).

Advertisement

In the post-Sept. 11 environment, the pressure is already high in the office. But the lives of all the characters are shattered when Jess’s daughter Carolyn (Zoe Graham) is found raped and murdered and Ray comes to suspect Marzin based on a photo from a department picnic. There is no physical evidence to link him to the case; while Ray and Claire manage to get what seems to be a vague confession out of Marzin during an interrogation, it becomes unusable when Ray goes overboard defending Claire from Marzin, who hits her. And their last option is exhausted when Siefert finds Marzin’s van and burns it to protect Marzin.

Years later, Ray has identified what he thinks is Marzin’s alias and begins pursuing him again. His obsession leads to a confrontation between cops and the operators of a chop shop, one of whom shoots and kills Siefert. Jess tells Ray and Claire that Ray’s search must stop: Ray has the wrong man, she insists, and she knows because she shot and killed Marzin years ago. But when Ray goes back to talk to Jess, he realizes that something much worse has happened. She did find Marzin years ago, but she’s been keeping him in a cage in an outbuilding on her property ever since.

I recognize that this is an extremely long plot summary. But without this detail, it’s difficult to discuss how “Secret in Their Eyes” fails as a movie in general and as the powerful post-Sept. 11 movie it so badly wants to be in particular.

Advertisement

From a simple plausibility standpoint, there are two changes that Billy Ray makes from the original that undermine his rendition of “Secret in Their Eyes.” In  Campanella’s original, the victim is the wife of an ordinary citizen, rather than a law enforcement official; Ray’s change makes it less likely that the case simply could have been buried. And while in Campanella’s film, the perpetrator is released by the Argentine regime during the Dirty War as a deliberate way for the government to flaunt its impunity, Ray keeps the same character free with the burning of the van. That scene is unnecessary, and it turns the new film’s critique of the War on Terror into melodrama. Instead, the vehicle simply could have disappeared into the same sort of chop shop that shows up later in the film.

And while I understand what Ray is trying with the final sequence — preserved from the original — that reveals a survivor keeping a perpetrator in a cage, locking them into a mutual life sentence, I’m not sure it works as the director intends. In the 2009 “Secret in Our Eyes,” the reveal turns a melancholy film into an actual horror movie. But in an American national security context, the parallels between Jess’s relationship with Marzin and the country’s uneasy and unending imprisonment of the remaining Guantanamo Bay detainees is a little too exact to be interesting or revealing.

A version of “Secret in Their Eyes” that simply forced the characters to accept uncertainty might have had a less horrific ending. But I wonder if it might have been a more powerful movie. By insisting that Carolyn’s killer could have been prosecuted if not for bureaucratic intransigence, infighting and myopia, Billy Ray’s riff on “Secret in Their Eyes” falls prey to the same logic that animates many of the movies we’ve made since Sept. 11 to dramatically expand the American security apparatus. In both cases, we assume that attacks are preventable, or at least can be solved and prosecuted in ways that achieve some measure of justice.

Advertisement

The far more radical and unsettling thing for a movie like “Secret in Their Eyes” to suggest is that, to a certain extent, we are powerless. If the film had ended with Jess calling off Ray and Claire not because she knows what happened to Marzin but because she doesn’t and accepts that she will never know, it would have forced the characters, and us, to grapple with the idea that we can’t entirely eliminate danger, and that we can’t always heal our wounds.

It’s one thing to argue that torture, indefinite detention and drone strikes warp us and our values if we believe they might achieve something. At the end of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful movie about the search for Osama bin Laden, Maya (Jessica Chastain) may be utterly depleted, but bin Laden is dead. It’s another to suggest that these tactics damage us fatally and that they don’t work, because nothing can give us the levels of security and the promises of justice we so desperately desire.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JomJysXZu8tr6OsKdoamBmgnB9kGhpbGejmrCzsdNmoKdlpJ2yqr6MnrCeq12Wu6V506GcZp6Rnrm2vsRmq6hlopqwrLvNZq6irJhiwamxjJqdrZ2ioq61tIyonWZxYWZ8