If, like me, you’re hoping that the inevitable narrative feature-film about the 1993 West Memphis child murders will be a serious treatment of the full scope of the tragedy — the original crime, its impact on the community, and the awful aftermath — rather than an easier, shallower take that simply gawks at “backwater” justice and rails against the apparently wrongful conviction of the recently freed “West Memphis Three” — then it is welcome news that Canadian director Atom Egoyan is at the helm.
On the same afternoon that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were freed after 18 years in prison for a crime they likely didn’t commit, it was announced that Egoyan has been tapped to helm a feature-film adaptation of Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, an account of the murders and subsequent trial by Arkansas reporter Mara Leveritt.
At first blush, Egoyan would seem to be the perfect choice to turn this tragic, controversial story into a worthwhile film. Even before Egoyan’s name surfaced in connection with the project, if I were to have cited any one film as a model for what a “West Memphis Three” film should be it would have been Egoyan’s harrowing 1997 masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter, a mournful adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel about the impact of a school-bus crash on a small town.
(As an aside, I hate referring to this story with the shorthand appellation “West Memphis Three,” which doesn’t acknowledge that six young lives were impacted, three terminally.)
An ideal treatment of this subject would combine the sensitivity, feel for imperiled community, and cool intelligence of Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter with, perhaps, a little of the obsessiveness and mystery of David Fincher’s Zodiac.
