“Fire talks to you. It does not lie.”
In Edward Zwick’s new film “Trial By Fire,” opening Friday, these words are spoken by an arson investigator testifying in the murder trial of Cameron Todd Willingham, the Corsicana man accused of burning his three young children to death two days before Christmas 1991.
But what if, the film asks, fire does lie? Or, at the very least, what if the story a fire tells — another dubious forensic axiom under scrutiny here — does not suit the wishes of a criminal justice system already predisposed to dismiss someone like Willingham, an unemployed mechanic known to sometimes drink too much and hit his wife, as a dirtbag?
“He was understood to be the Other, and we have a way of wanting to get rid of the Other from our midst if given the opportunity,” reasons Zwick in a phone interview. “I think that was something that happened too easily to him; and also, he had really no great defense against it.”
A Corsicana jury took little more than an hour to convict Willingham, who was 23 at the time of his children’s death. The case continues to smolder long after his 2004 execution by lethal injection.
“Trial By Fire” is based on
David Grann’s article of the same name, which The New Yorker originally published in August 2009. Not only was Willingham innocent of the murders, Grann’s article argued, but his conviction was based on testimony that amounted to so much hocus-pocus.
Helping send Willingham to death row were a jailhouse snitch who had been offered a reduced sentence in exchange for fabricating a confession from Willingham — he recanted his testimony years later, not that it made any difference — and an arson expert whose conclusions are described later on in the film as “astrology.”
After Grann’s article, these events were also covered in an episode of PBS’s “Frontline” and Joe Bailey Jr. and Steve Mims’ 2011 documentary “Incendiary: The Willingham Case.” Now it returns to theaters as a dramatic feature starring Laura Dern and Jack O’Connell and directed by Zwick, the Oscar-winning producer and director whose credits include “Glory,” “Blood Diamond” and the multiple Emmy-winning TV drama “thirtysomething.”
The Houston connection
Zwick recalls spending “hours and hours” with screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (“Precious”) to craft Grann’s article into a workable screenplay, one that likewise leaves Willingham under suspicion as long as possible.
“One thing that we agreed on was that, in David’s article, the thing that was very compelling in the beginning was to be convinced of Todd’s guilt, as were those jurors in Corsicana and as were those forensic examiners,” says Zwick.
“If the audience could be convinced and condemn him as they did, then they would be complicit,” he adds, “and they would then understand and feel the full weight of the story as it unfolds before them.”
But about 50 minutes into “Trial By Fire,” an unexpected ray of hope comes into Willingham’s life in the form of Elizabeth Gilbert, played by Dern. A playwright and teacher from Houston, Gilbert began corresponding with Willingham around 1999, after becoming involved with an organization that helped arrange pen pals for death row inmates.
Before long, their unlikely friendship inspired Gilbert to begin re-investigating Willingham’s case.
According to Zwick, this twist allowed him to focus on “this remarkable relationship between these two people,” he says. “This unexpected coming together of these two people created extraordinary meaning for (Willingham), and actually for both of them, in the most unusual and unexpected circumstances.”
As played by Dern, Gilbert gradually regains her emotional footing after meeting Willingham. The film picks up shortly after her ex-husband has been diagnosed with cancer; he later dies, further complicating her relationship with her two teenage children.
Gilbert was closely involved with the production, notes Zwick, and even allowed Fletcher to incorporate the letters Willingham had written her from prison into his screenplay.
“I think because of the seriousness of the story, we might not have credited her with a kind of lovely humor and life force that she has,” says Zwick. “I think Laura glimpsed that in her conversations with Liz.
“It’s also something that Laura is possessed of in abundance,” the director adds. “I think that ended up giving them a much more dimensional and complex description of (Liz) rather than just the earnest do-gooder.”
Changing his life
Willingham experiences a sort of awakening on death row, explains the man who plays him, British actor Jack O’Connell.
“It seemed to me like he went into prison probably academically challenged,” says O’Connell, perhaps best known in the U.S. for his role in the grim Netflix western “Godless.” “And when his life depended on it, it seemed to me that he did educate himself — in the legal system, anyway.”
After meeting Gilbert, Willingham “tried to give himself the best opportunity to be able to provide a learned case for himself,” O’Connell adds, “because there was nobody available to do that for him.”
Despite the publicity created by Grann’s article and the continuing efforts of organizations like The Innocence Project to clear Willingham’s name, any reform prompted by the case has been glacially slow.
In 2015, the Texas State Bar Association brought misconduct charges against John Jackson, Willingham’s prosecuting attorney, but he was acquitted after a two-week trial; Johnny Webb, the jailhouse informant whose testimony helped convict Willingham, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 50 times during the trial, according to the investigative nonprofit The Marshall Project.
Leaning toward the light
The epilogue of “Trial By Fire” focuses on Rick Perry, then governor of Texas, at a debate among 2012 Republican presidential candidates. Though the question is not explicitly about Willingham, moderator Brian Williams asks Perry if the thought of Texas possibly executing an innocent person ever keeps him from sleeping at night.
Not surprisingly, the answer is no.
“The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, very clear process in place of which when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens: they get a fair hearing, they go though an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States if that’s required,” says the governor, now the U.S. secretary of energy.
“But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens,” continues Perry, “you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed.”
The audience at the debate applauds.
“Justice is a hard thing to carry out to its fullest, as far as human error can be accounted for,” says O’Connell. “(It) has to be a thorough process, and with that takes time, resource, money and all these other things that perhaps weren’t available.”
“I talked to a lot of men who were incarcerated,” adds Zwick. “One man said to me he has to make a decision every day about whether to despair or to lean toward the light.”
In Willingham’s case, says the director, “I think he, in the most cruel circumstances that I could ever imagine, was able to find some meaning in his life.
“That’s a hard thing for all of us sometimes, regardless of the sentence that we’re under; regardless of the tragedy that we suffer or the unfairness that we experience,” he continues. “In that sense (the film) is a larger metaphor than just about death row.”
Source: Houston Chronicle, Chris Gray, May 13, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
