This movie does not have -everything-. The characters are not complex. Team John (Wallace (Andy Griffith)) is composed of one devil and his hirelings and cowed servants. Team Lamar (Potts (Johnny Cash)) are the forces of good. Also, there is no real suspense. The narrator tells you one minute in that this is the story of the man who "brought (Wallace) down." The screenplay is competent but not stellar, and contains unintentional laugh lines, for instance from Wallace who keeps telling his hirelings to "shut up, you fool!" in front of Potts.
Also, trigger warning: Wallace uses the N-word enough to accentuate how bad he is, although you don't hear it as much from everyone else as you probably would have from the real white people in 1948 Georgia.
Having said that, though, there are virtues. It -seems-, judging from what I read in Wikipedia, to track the historical facts pretty well. You will think that movie-Wallace had a hell of a lot of chutzpah to just commit his crimes in front of people and leave the evidence lying around, but it seems the real Wallace did just that. June Carter Cash appears, to do a turn as a weird fortune-teller; the weird part is that this was apparently a real person who actually testified at the trial.
Following the criminal, procedural and legal trail is interesting enough. My chief unanswered question is whether it's really true that nobody in Georgia knew what a "corpus delicti" really is and thought that if you destroy the body you get away with murder, but Wallace might certainly have thought so. The acting is certainly good enough to put over the characters the movie is putting over. I found the end pretty satisfying (spoiler/trigger warning: it involves an execution).
I read yesterday something going back to Goethe that said that the three questions about a drama are: What were the authors trying to do? Did they do it? Was it worth it? I think they were trying to give us a relatively satisfying piece of true-crime comfort food, they did it, and as to whether it was worth it to show an arrogant rich guy who thought himself above the law brought down by a guy personifying the law, on a cold day in January 2018 it seems worth it to me.
At one point near the end, Wallace feeds Potts the "you're just like me" line that sociopaths always kind of believe, saying that "you're a powerful man who wouldn't like it taken from you." They never understand the difference between the kind of power you get from terrorizing and bribing people and the kind you get from inspiring and influencing people. Potts doesn't give a poetic riposte, though he could have, having earlier gotten seemingly half of Coweta county out to search for the body, not because they feared him or wanted money from him, but because they were believers. I don't always believe in the rule of law, but it's nice sometimes to curl up with a movie that does.
Also, trigger warning: Wallace uses the N-word enough to accentuate how bad he is, although you don't hear it as much from everyone else as you probably would have from the real white people in 1948 Georgia.
Having said that, though, there are virtues. It -seems-, judging from what I read in Wikipedia, to track the historical facts pretty well. You will think that movie-Wallace had a hell of a lot of chutzpah to just commit his crimes in front of people and leave the evidence lying around, but it seems the real Wallace did just that. June Carter Cash appears, to do a turn as a weird fortune-teller; the weird part is that this was apparently a real person who actually testified at the trial.
Following the criminal, procedural and legal trail is interesting enough. My chief unanswered question is whether it's really true that nobody in Georgia knew what a "corpus delicti" really is and thought that if you destroy the body you get away with murder, but Wallace might certainly have thought so. The acting is certainly good enough to put over the characters the movie is putting over. I found the end pretty satisfying (spoiler/trigger warning: it involves an execution).
I read yesterday something going back to Goethe that said that the three questions about a drama are: What were the authors trying to do? Did they do it? Was it worth it? I think they were trying to give us a relatively satisfying piece of true-crime comfort food, they did it, and as to whether it was worth it to show an arrogant rich guy who thought himself above the law brought down by a guy personifying the law, on a cold day in January 2018 it seems worth it to me.
At one point near the end, Wallace feeds Potts the "you're just like me" line that sociopaths always kind of believe, saying that "you're a powerful man who wouldn't like it taken from you." They never understand the difference between the kind of power you get from terrorizing and bribing people and the kind you get from inspiring and influencing people. Potts doesn't give a poetic riposte, though he could have, having earlier gotten seemingly half of Coweta county out to search for the body, not because they feared him or wanted money from him, but because they were believers. I don't always believe in the rule of law, but it's nice sometimes to curl up with a movie that does.