The movie stars Reese Witherspoon as one of the mothers and Colin Firth as an investigator of sorts. The town screams that the teenagers were all involved, yet one mother isn’t sure (Reese Witherspoon’s character) because one of the boys, Jesse, has the IQ of a ten year old, and he gets a lot of the details wrong when he is telling the police of being at the murder.
There is also the interview of a child, and children are often unreliable witnesses. All of the evidence used against the three teenagers was circumstantial, and there wasn’t any concrete evidence. It turns out that the mother of this child was trying to get out of some legal trouble of her own.
The movie was an interesting look into the legal system, and how broken it really is. People judge things that they don’t understand, and they always think that Satanism is evil, which it is not (just look it up if you don’t believe me).
The beginning of the movie is very suspenseful, and even heartbreaking. When the bodies of the boys are found and one boy is brought out of the water he was placed in, it is a horrifying moment that would touch even the hardest soul. Throughout the movie the audience is left to wonder who is guilty of the murders, as even some of the parents (besides Witherspoon’s character) doubt the guilt of the three convicted of killing their boys. Then again, maybe they doubted the guilt of the teenagers because they themselves were the murderers.
Since this movie is based on a true story, there isn’t really an ending to it. It is still ongoing, and there are suspects, but the truth may never be found. The movie was interesting, and well done. It showed the limits of the justice system, and really why innocent people are convicted. In a murder this heinous, everyone wants to find the guilty party as soon as they can, so that everyone else with a child can feel as if their child is safe. But if we rush to accuse and convict, sometimes we miss important things, like who might have actually committed the crime. This is one of the reason crimes from fifty plus years ago are still unsolved, or are just not being solved.
A good, if not heart strangling movie.