OVP: A Cry in the Dark (1988)

Film: A Cry in the Dark (1988)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Sam Neill
Director: Fred Schepisi
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Meryl Streep)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

With our week devoted to Best Actress on Day 3, we're going to have a bit of a twofer here with another Meryl Streep performance.  With Monday's One True Thing and today's A Cry in the Dark, I have officially seen every single performance that Meryl Streep has ever been nominated for an Oscar for, which is pretty cool (for the record, I cannot state the same for other oft-nominated performers like Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, & Jack Nicholson, though I'm working on it!).  A Cry in the Dark (also known as Evil Angels outside of the United States), was a departure for Streep, sporting dark black hair & receiving the last nomination she'd win for a drama for seven years (she'd do mostly comedies or unsuccessful serious films for the new few years), and it was a flop when it initially came out.  It's most noted in today's culture for a single line of dialogue: "the dingo took my baby."

(Spoilers Ahead) Michael (Neill) and Lindy (Streep) Chamberlain are devout Seventh-Day Adventists with Michael serving as pastor at their local parish.  They have two young boys and an infant daughter, and are out on a vacation to Australian tourist destination Ayers Rock.  While camping, they see something coming out of their tent, but Lindy is the only person who can clearly see that it's a dingo, and that it has taken their infant daughter.  Panicked, the two obviously search for their daughter, to no avail.  The public becomes unusually interested in the couple after they do several interviews, first in search of the baby, and then more so because the public keeps demanding more information, with many attributing falsities or using religious bigotry (Seventh-Day Adventist is not a common religion in Australia) to attack the Chamberlains.  Eventually, they stand trial twice (the second time with Lindy being indicted) before they are finally exonerated, after their daughter's jacket is found near where the dingos had been spotted.

The film is fascinating from a practical standpoint for a variety of reasons.  For starters, this was really only the middle of the conversation about the Chamberlains-in 1988, public opinion was still not with the Chamberlains, and there were still a lot of open questions over their guilt.  This would continue into 1995, when an inquest into the cause of death of their daughter, Azaria, was found to be still be unknown and then finally in 2012 it was decided conclusively that a dingo had been responsible for the death of the infant, and the Chamberlains won over $1 million for wrongful arrest.  In subsequent years there have been far more documented cases of dingos attacking children and infants.

The movie is also interesting because it sort of predicted that the idea of the "celebrity trial" would dominate the coming decades.  The Chamberlains went from being ordinary people to being household names in Australia, really the first time something like this had happened in the country.  The fact that this true crime tale wouldn't do well in American box office is odd, because over the coming decades the Menendez Brothers, Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias, and John & Patsy Ramsey would become front-page news for months, turning ordinary people into infamous names.  This was still a relatively new concept in 1988, before a 24-hour news cycle would be able to turn such cases into national affairs, and the movie does a good job of tracking exactly how that happens.

The film itself is good, though I wasn't super beholden to it.  Streep's accent work is flawless (this was one of the many such accents that earned her reputation in the 1980's), but I do feel like this is the rare Streep dramatic performance where she is too reliant on the real-life figure.  Lindy Chamberlain was a notoriously standoffish person, someone whose public persona indicted her far more than the evidence (people thought she wasn't "grieving" outwardly enough for a mother who had lost her child), and Streep shows this, but she doesn't give an insight as to why Lindy is like this, or how this is affecting us until far too late in the film.  There's still technical prowess here, and she's better than a lot of the missed opportunities in 1988 for Best Actress (particularly Oscar's victor), but I left this simply with my expectations met, rather than exceeded like we saw with One True Thing earlier this week.