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Documentaries have been such big box-office in recent years that it's startling to recall that they used to be so commercially risky that they generally went straight to television. The mere fact that Errol Morris's films made it onto the big screen speaks volumes in itself. He first made a splash with Gates of Heaven (1978), a delightfully eccentric film about the contrasting fortunes of Californian pet-cemetery owners that turned into a wide-ranging philosophical reflection on everything from the grieving process to religion to the entrepreneurship underlining the American dream. As with Morris's 1980 follow-up Vernon, Florida (a similarly wayward study of the title town's bizarre inhabitants), it's hard to tell whether it's supposed to be funny: his deadpan interviewees are so blithely ensconced in their own private universes that listening to their monologues seems like eavesdropping. Despite critical ecstasy (Roger Ebert put Gates of Heaven on his all-time top ten), the films didn't earn much, and Morris switched careers in the early 1980s to become a private investigator, an experience that fed into the extraordinary The Thin Blue Line (1988). While researching another project, Morris became fascinated by the case of Randall Dale Adams, a man on death row for the murder of a cop. Convinced of his innocence, Morris amassed a mountain of evidence and constructed an argument that even the notoriously trigger-happy Texas authorities found unanswerable: after the film's release, the case was reopened and Adams exonerated. But with its cool, controlled visual style, pulsing Philip Glass score and overlaying of multiple viewpoints (the real killer is among the interviewees), it's far more Rashomon than Crimewatch.

 

Michael Brooke on 9th June 2006
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