Review: Edward Zwick’s Trial by Fire Has the Ring of a Rallying Cry

Edward Zwick’s Trial by Fire dramatizes the case against the death penalty by focusing on the real-life ordeal of a man executed by the state of Texas in 2004 weeks after the emergence of definitive evidence attesting to his innocence. Adapted by screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher from David Grann’s 2009 New Yorker article of the same name, the film aims for a political and aesthetic middle ground. Though it has a clear point of view about our criminal justice system not being able to prevent the execution of the innocent, it doesn’t press too hard on the question of whether the death penalty is ever justified, and it never diverges far from standard Hollywood melodrama. Nevertheless, Zwick uses this popular artistic mode to stake out a moral and political stance that, if not radical, is at least forceful.

Cameron Todd Willingham (Jack O’Connell) is a working-class stay-at-home father whose three daughters are killed in a house fire one morning in 1991. The film opens with the man, shirtless and charred, stumbling out of his burning home as a girl (Lena Levings) across the street yells to her mother, Margaret Hays (Katie McClellan), to come outside. The woman calls the fire department as Willingham, distraught and confused, retrieves a tire iron from his car and breaks the window to his daughters’ bedroom. Later, in a trial stacked against Willingham by police and prosecutors who lead and bribe witnesses as a matter of course, Margaret testifies that Willingham did nothing to save his children until the fire department arrived, implying his efforts to break back into the house were for show.

Fire investigators working for the Corsicana, Texas police department charge into the home under the presumption that they’re investigating a case of arson, and that Willingham is the only conceivable guilty party. After all, the man was known by police as a bad seed, having bumped up against the law more than once, including several domestic abuse complaints involving his wife, Stacy (Emily Meade). It doesn’t do Willingham any favors that he’s a tattooed heavy metal fan in a state run by clean-cut authorities gripped by satanic panic. Needless to say, the jury returns a guilty verdict in less than an hour.

Trial by Fire’s second half jumps from the early ’90s to the early aughts, and from Willingham’s perspective to that of Elizabeth Gilbert (Laura Dern), a crusading, bleeding-heart playwright who befriends the imprisoned Willingham, becoming his pen pal and eventually visiting him on death row. Soon, Gilbert is spearheading an effort, aided by the fledgling Innocence Project, to prove the man’s innocence, based on the inconsistencies she discovers in public records of witness testimonies and further evidence she’s able to uncover. Dern anchors Trial by Fire with a deeply felt performance, keeping Gilbert’s empathy and moral certitude grounded and human rather than lofty and idealized.

Some of the details of the true story have been changed for the sake of narrative efficiency or emotional impact. For example, the two real-life witnesses who were called to the stand are amalgamated into one, and the neighbor who calls the fire department actually lived down the street from Willingham. But other details of the film are clear dramatic abstractions that detract from its impact by haphazardly trying to augment it, from Henry Jackman’s overwrought score to the emotionally manipulative coincidence that Willingham’s execution date is delivered to him while he’s listening to Gilbert defend him on the radio.

And then there’s Ponchai Wilkerson (McKinley Belcher III), a friend Willingham makes on death row. Ponchai existed in real life, but here he’s presented as far too familiar a stereotype—a poor black man with sage-like wisdom that belies his station in life, who helps the hero achieve a deeper understanding of his conundrum before being marched off to death. Unlike Willingham, Ponchai is guilty of his crime, so while his is the voice that reminds us that the system is broken and that it’s weighted against the racially and economically marginalized, his death is narratively meaningful only as it relates to that of our innocent, white hero.

It’s in such areas that the film’s compromises become apparent. Its reproduction of familiar racial dynamics is accompanied by a superfluous late-film emphasis on the guilty conscience of prosecutor John H. Jackson (Jason Douglas), as if the film were scrambling to say “not all prosecutors.” It also pivots toward being a direct indictment of former Texas governor Rick Perry, and at the expense of condemning the justice system as a whole. Trial by Fire can be respected for its righteous indignation and its relative unsparingness in depicting capital punishment. The film is unequivocal that death by lethal injection is both cruel and unusual, but certain melodramatic fabrications unnecessarily soften aspects of that political message.