Primal Fear
A modern black-as-hell film noir, set in Chicago, decades before Spotlight. For a courtroom drama with people talking, it has some cinematic aerial shots, panning from downtown to the wrong side of the tracks.
That aerial shot is punctuated by a fantastic song by a local artist, much mocked here but with massive success abroad. The guy from Scarface even gives the CD to our protagonist, how did that happen?
Our protagonist played by Richard Gere is a sleazy defense attorney, driving a Mercedes for defending mobsters and criminals. He was a prosecutor in the past, but after an unnamed potentially illegal indiscretion with the current DA, he moved to private practice. His old protégé and former friend with benefits remains there, pretty pissed about how he never levelled up their relationship.
After extracting one and a half million bucks from the state for his mobster friend, who gives him a tour of some South Side abandoned car parks and shady apartment buildings. The classic noir real estate deal is to buy up land at a depressed price, build luxury condos and earn millions, by displacing the poor inhabitants. Some of the land is church property, which means the archbishop put the kibosh on that deal, costing millions. For that he must die.
The archbishop is murdered in broad daylight, brutally butchered, with alphanumerics carved in his chest. A meek altar boy is seen fleeing the scene, covered in blood and in shock. Our ambulance chaser protagonist offers to defend him pro bono, for the publicity (in case he couldn’t get more sleazy), and gets convinced there was a third man on the kill room.
The prosecutor will be his old fling, under enormous pressure for getting the death penalty. She’s tough and smart, but eventually our protagonist summons the DA and he is forced to spill the beans on the whole real estate deal, which costs her her job.
As that wasn’t bad enough, a VHS is uncovered that shows the archbishop taped his sermon rehearsals, but reused the camcorder to film a home movie with the altar boys and a girl, “casting out their daemons”, if you know what I mean. The main blood-soaked suspect was forced to share his girlfriend with other men for the archbishop to ejaculate.
Eventually, a psychiatrist diagnoses him with Multiple Personality Disorder, hiding a violent and confrontational slick. Also during the trial, the mobster that took the money is found floating face down in the river.
He is baited during the trial and lashed out at the prosecutor, ending the trial and locking him um in a psychiatric ward.
The final twist was that it was all a ruse. There’s no multiple personalities, just a criminal mastermind, manipulating everyone to get his way. Not even the psychiatrist finds out.
In case you don’t figure out it’s a noir, it ends with soft jazz, right after the final twist reveal and our protagonist has lost it all. Turns out defense attorneys do defend sleazeballs, more often than not.
I just don’t understand the title? Who’s got the fear? The bishops, the main suspect, the lawyers?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.