The Accused

I had the opportunity to DVR Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning role in The Accused some months back. I see that it's on again, tonight at 11:57 PM on StarzEncore Classics, so I made a point of watching it to do a review on here.

Foster plays Sarah Tobias, whom we only see a couple of minutes into the movie. First up is a mysterious man coming out of a bar called "The Mill" to call 911 and report that he's just seen a rape in the bar and that the victim needs help. The dispatcher on the other end wants the guy's name, which he's understandably reluctant about giving his name. It's only then that we see Sarah running out of The Mill; she's the victim.

If being gang-raped isn't traumatic enough, there's what happens next, at the hospital where Sarah has to be treated but also questioned so that the police and prosecutors can get evidence for the rape case. Searching for hairs or other detritus that the rapists left behind is intrusive and degrading, and the questions are uncomfortable. It doesn't help that Sarah turns out to be the sort of witness that a competent defense attorney is going to rip to shreds on the stand.

Partly because of Sarah's perceived unreliability, and because the State has its own interests and not those of the victim as a top priority -- and then add a dollop of pressure from the DA, the Assistant District Attorney who was given the task of prosecuting the case, Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) decides to offer the three defendants a plea bargain wherein they'll plead guilty to a felony that's for something other than a sex crime. They'll likely be sentenced to 2-5 years but get out sooner for good behavior in prison.

Sarah, unsurprisingly, is pissed when she finds this out, obtaining Murphy's address and rudely interrupting a dinner party in a scene that seemed thoroughly unrealistic to me, but what are you going to do. And then when she runs into one of the patrons at the Mill that night who was cheering on the three rapists, she decides to plow her car into the man's pickup truck.

It may seem crazy, but it gets results. Murphy goes to see Sarah and the guy at the hospital, and discovers that the man has a tattoo just like what Sarah had described one of the people at the bar as having had. This gives Murphy the idea of coming through the criminal code to see if there's some crime on the books that she can use to get the witnesses who were there cheering and egging on the three actual rapists convicted, which would thereby make it clear in the eyes of the law that there was in fact a rape. Murphy eventually finds "criminal solicitation".

But there's still the problem of whether defense attorneys will be able to skewer Sarah on the stand. And where is that one guy who called 911 all those months ago to report the rape in the first place? Unsurprisingly, Murphy is able to find him thanks to a ridiculous coincidence, and a contrived scene that convinces him to testify.

I found myself having problems with The Accused that are mainly down to a script that seemed to start to devolve into "TV movie of the week with an important social issue" territory. That's a shame, since the performances are quite good, at least as far as the script allows, and since there are a lot of interesting issues that get glossed over. I briefly mentioned the idea that the State cares more about its own institutions than the interests of the actual crime victims, which is something that, unsurprisingly, the movie doesn't want to broach at all, even though it's become a much bigger issue over the past 30 years with state Attorneys General becoming more and more of a political position than one rooted in justice.

I also couldn't help but think of Thomas More's speech to Will Roper in A Man for All Seasons about cutting down all the laws to get at Satan as Murphy was finding the "criminal solicitation" statute to go after the men who watched. These men were certainly morally guilty -- and may even have been legally guilty -- but you know that law is going to be twisted even further the next time around. It's an uncomfortable thing to say, especially when you've got a person like Sarah who's an obvious victim multiple times over, but it also goes back the first point about the State caring less about her than about itself.

Even with those flaws, however, The Accused is still a compelling movie thanks to Foster's performance, which is frankly better than Silence of the Lambs a few years later. The Accused is definitely worth a watch.