This will be one of several reviews from this year’s Tribeca film Festival. To follow our coverage, click here.
Irish writer/director Jim Sheridan is primarily known for his many collaborations with Daniel Day-Lewis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including My Left Foot (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993), two films awarded with a bevy of Academy Award nominations and in the case of the former, earned Day-Lewis with his first Best Actor Oscar. Besides some success in the early 2000s with 2002’s In America, Sheridan has since failed to achieve the same level of critical success as his earliest works, going on to direct such films as Brothers (2009), Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005), and Dream House (2011).
On December 24th, 1996, French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was killed in Cork, Ireland. Her assassination shocked Ireland and France. The main suspect, freelance journalist Ian Bailey who lived near the alley where the police found her body. Getting arrested for the crime, his case failed to be taken to trial in Ireland due to a lack of evidence. In 2019, Bailey was sentenced to twenty-five years in the French courts. However, Ireland refused to extradite him. Re-creation, the latest film from Sheridan and co-writer and co-director David Merriman, employs a bold premise. one that imagines a world where Bailey (Colm Meaney) would face trial in Ireland.
In this sense, Sheridan and Merriman concentrate Re-creation on the would be final judgment of the jury tasked to determine the journalist’s fate. The screenplay sets up the notion that each jury member is certain of Bailey’s guilt, however, Juror Number 8 (Vicky Krieps) ignites the questioning about Bailey’s participation in the murder, forcing the others to reconsider their opinions about the case. Through the film, the directors use the cinematic format to envision what his trial could have been like. To create the story, they and the filmmaking team, consulted legal experts from across Europe and studied legal archives to write an accurate script. That being said, the dramatization of the jury’s deliberation and final decision made for a poor imagining that is arguably not the most indicative of reality.
Sheridan, whose most successful efforts include another court drama, In The Name of the Father, misses the mark. Besides the forced narrative of how each jury member questions and then changes the other’s opinions through sporadic conversations. He and Merriman’s direction, when it comes to his actors, lacks consistency and control over each performance. A simple dialogue can lead to an overly dramatic and shouted conversation that is as emotive as staring straight at a wall. As a result, his cold courtroom drama opens itself up to over-the-top performances that add no emotion or profundity overall.
Furthermore, Re-creation is formally rigid regarding its use of courtroom drama as a means to analyze a traumatic moment in Irish history. Similarly, the camera blocking is the most conventional possible, and visually, the film does not bring anything different make its drama or suspense as engaging as it aims to be. The film is framed as an experiment of what could have happened. However, it is too strict in its execution, closing itself off to other possibilities and lacking the nuance of what was a complex case.
In the end, this new effort by veteran director Jim Sheridan and David Merriman is a contradictory execution of its premise. Re-creation tries to explore a moment that never happened. However, the film is simply too plain and conventional to leave any room for thought or engagement with its unusual premise.
Score: 20/100
*still courtesy of Latido Films*
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Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.
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