`Before and After' explores family pathos, moral conflict
Before and After is a thriller with a unique moral dilemma: What do you do when the desire for justice conflicts with the instinctual urge to protect your children? While the movie has some bumps here and there, it examines this problem in an exciting and intelligent way.
Liam Neeson and Meryl Streep star as Ben and Carolyn Ryan, residents of a small Massachusetts town who live an idyllic upper middle-class lifestyle. Their happy life is shattered when their teenage son Jacob (Edward Furlong) is suspected of brutally murdering his girlfriend. Jacob disappears, causing the police to start a manhunt and his parents to start worrying.
When Ben learns that Jacob is a suspect, he immediately searches his son's car, finding damning evidence that he promptly burns. As for Carolyn, her parental instincts are more tempered, but she still feels the urge to protect her son from whatever danger he may encounter.
In the meantime, the town has ostracized the family, branding the boy as a murderer and his parents as his supporters.
When the police find Jacob and return him to the town to stand trial, he tells his parents what really happened the day his girlfriend was killed. If it's true, it would absolve him from all responsibility. Prob- lem is, it's a difficult story to believe.
That's when the family starts to split up: Carolyn wants Jacob to stand by his story in defense of the truth, but Ben wants his son to take the route that will keep him out of prison and let his attorney find reasonable doubt, whatever the cost to truth. The drama plays out both in the home and in the courtroom.
If there's anything to remember from this movie, it's how this drama reaches its resolution. Another movie would have let everyone off the hook and back to their normal lives within a fortnight.
Fortunately, Before and After remembers that a real-life dilemma is made up of choosing between two undesirable alternatives, not finding a happy medium. And sure enough, the ending of this movie is unhappy. This comes as a surprise, because the rest of the movie has the feel of a typical American thriller that ends up with the good guys winning. What we get with this movie, however, is something more real and more tragic.
Another important aspect of Before and After is its criticism of the cynical way in which the justice system works. Jacob's trial seems more of a contest between how well the attorneys perform rather than a search for the truth. In light of the O.J. Simpson trial, this examination of the legal system is particularly relevant and interesting.
The movie's downfall, however, is its terrible dialogue. At key dramatic moments in the movie, it becomes forced, contrived and cheesy. Even actors such as Neeson and Streep can't act their way around the bad writing in this movie. And with the lesser-experienced actors in the movie, such as Furlong, it just makes you want to wince.
But if you can get around bad lines once in a while, Before and After makes for a fine film. There's lots of suspense that will keep you interested and plenty of meaningful themes that will keep you thinking.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the February 23, 1996 issue.
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