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Brother’s Keeper / USA / 1992

As an indictment of the American judicial system, Brother’s Keeper is one-dimensional, determined from its opening minutes in delineating the flaws of a prosecution’s tactics. As with The Thin Blue Line, with which this film shares more than cosmetic similarities, the viewer is posited expressly on the side of defense, and as such, both are flawed, sometimes hostilely one-sided films.

However, I strongly laud both, not for the persuasion of their judgment, but for the communities and personalities they investigate. Each film indirectly contends that in these cases, the defendants are hastily characterized as murderers. Randall Adams and, in Brother’s Keeper, Delbert Ward are manipulated men, used as pawns at the whim of an obscenely powerful judicial mechanism, and are characterized as compassionate, sympathetic people. Whereas Morris’ film considers the stakes of many players involved in Adam’s murder trial, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky engage the community. Ward, in is sixties and barely literate, comes from a rural New York town of around 500 people. His accusation threatens everyone within proximity, and observing his humiliation and the subsequent sympathy his people give him is truly a remarkable experience, one more compassionately rendered than in the pair’s subsequent Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: VHS
19 Jun 2006 12:14 PM | Comments (1)

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1. Linda Warsing / 26 August 2007 / 1:33 PM

   This is a terrible film. It started out ok, but when this two filmmakers showed the brutal killing of a little pig, I could watch it no more.I am an animal lover and vegetarian, and why they would film such an act is disgusting. It had nothing to do with the contents of the documentary, and they should be ashamed, and certainly don’t deserve the accolades they have gotten.I will never watch another of their films.