Une intime conviction

Fact-based movie depicting the case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, an Army Special Forces group surgeon accused of murdering his wife and daughters. This two-part heart-wrencher is incredibly gripping, and chock-full-of powerful acting. Karl Malden and Gary Cole deliver such incredible performances, it is no wonder Malden was nominated for an Emmy. Very sad and moving, but clearly worthy of watching. I give it 8.5 out of 10 stars.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)

Although director David Greene is known almost exclusively for his work in television, this movie is several notches above most TV fare. Running a full three hours and twenty minutes in two parts, Fatal Vision is just about as riveting as the book of the same name from which it was adapted. The screenplay by long time Hollywood pro John Gay amounts to an indictment of army Captain Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, but then again so did the book.

Gary Cole gives a convincing performance as the former Green Beret army officer who was accused, and then some nine years after the fact, convicted of the murder of his pregnant wife Collette and two young daughters. Karl Malden plays Freddy Kassab, Collette's father, with his usual skill, while Eva Marie Saint plays Kassab's wife.

Since it is still being debated to this day whether Jeffrey MacDonald really was guilty of this horrendous crime (as he continues to serve his prison sentence), perhaps we should appreciate this movie strictly as a study in sociopathology.

The story begins February 17, 1970 with MacDonald phoning the police to report that his wife and two daughters had been brutally murdered by a marauding gang of hippies who broke into his home shouting "Kill the pigs, acid is groovy." He claims he tried to fight them off and was injured and knocked unconscious.

In contrast, the story presented by the prosecution and detailed in McGinniss's book, portrays MacDonald as having, in a fit of temper injured or killed a member of his family, and then to cover up that crime killed all of them, and then fabricated a crime scene to support his story including the infliction of superficial wounds upon himself.

The question most people would like answered is WHY would a previously upstanding member of the community, a successful doctor as well as a decorated army Captain, go to such a horrendous extreme to cover up a crime no worse than manslaughter, if that?

The answer is in the character of Jeffrey MacDonald himself who is depicted as a psychopath possibly under the influence of amphetamines, a man so callous and unfeeling about the pain and suffering of anyone except himself, that he would murder his own family in an attempt to divert the blame from himself. This was the answer that McGinniss came up with after spending a lot of time with MacDonald and after initially believing him to be innocent.

This is the answer that the jury believed, and this is the answer given in the character that Gary Cole so vividly portrays.

There are many kinds of truth--legal truth decided by a jury, scientific truth decided by experiment and confirmation, spiritual truth, etc. And there is cinematic artistic truth, decided by the viewer. I think the business-like direction from Greene and his adherence to McGinniss's "vision," along with the fine performance by Gary Cole make us aware of the reality that there are sociopaths among us who can charm and kill with equal ease.

Regardless of the true facts of the case (which we will never know for certain) it is this singular truth that makes this movie worth seeing.

If you read Joe McGinnes' book, you'd find it difficult to accuse the author of trying to sell more copies of it by twisting facts around. McGinnis was hired in the first place by MacDonald to tell his side of the story and only gradually did the writer change his mind about MacDonald's innocence. Of course McGinnis wanted his book to sell, so he could become rich and famous, just as MacDonald wanted his story told so he could become rich and famous too. Everyone wants to be rich and famous. But some people want it a LOT more than others and, according to McGinnes, this was Jeff MacDonald's biggest problem.

The book ends with a description of a "narcissistic personality" drawn from the work of Christopher Lasch. There's some reason to believe that MacDonald belonged in that category. One of his last writings to McGinnes detailed a number of his greatest regrets about his life. Chief among them was not having actually gotten a degree from Princeton. (He transferred to Northwestern's medical school after his third year.) That's a pretty dumb thing to put down as a great regret unless you're something of a narcissist.

Of course being a narcissist doesn't make you a murderer. In this case, it was the physical evidence that made the difference. It's true, as earlier comments have mentioned, that the army made a botch of the crime scene. They tramped all over, setting disturbed items upright, even swiping MacDonald's wallet. But some of the comments have been misleading, because McGinnis's book describes all this, and the film does too. Of course, having the army foul up a crime scene doesn't make you innocent either. In the end, McGinnis found MacDonald's story unbelievable because, in addition to the physical evidence, there was the simple fact that MacDonald "hadn't been hurt badly enough."

The murderers in his tale (one of them a girl in a floppy hat) beat the other three members of his family to death and stab them. And here is MacDonald, a trained green beret, who gets tangled up in his pajamas while his wife is screaming in the background and who then passes out, sustaining a few scratches and a neat nick that ends in a small pneumothorax, which sounds terrible but which a doctor would recognize as not in itself life threatening.

And this quartet of murderers in MacDonald's description is pretty interesting in itself. The sort of group that everyone at the time carried around in an easily accessible part of his or her memory, because everyone had been so shocked at the Manson family shortly before. But they are a square guy's cliché of what senseless murderers would look like. I was working on a research project into LSD use at the time of the murders and interviewed dozens of acid heads and dopers from all walks of life. (They included the entire fencing team at an Ivy League university.) They didn't have much in common except that when tripping they were one hundred per cent nonviolent. As one reporter put it, "When people are on acid they can't even organize a trip to the men's room." And nobody would dream of saying something like, "Acid is groovy," while trying to slice somebody up. Any acid head knew that things were a lot more complicated than that. (Nobody involved in the case seems to have had any idea of what the effects of recreational drugs were like. One young woman suspected of being the girl in the floppy hat, can't provide an alibi for herself because she "was out on marijuana" for four hours.) The "pigs" written in blood was a direct ripoff of the Manson family murders, whoever put it up there.

The film follows the book pretty closely, painting a picture of Jeff MacDonald that is distinctly unflattering. Smart but shallow, he got out of the army pronto and lived in a Marina del Rey condo with blonde airheads seriatim. I'd like to see him put away if only out of envy. But was he guilty? Well, there was hardly a rush to judgment. It took years to convict him, long after the immediate sensation of the case died down. What leaves me with some lingering doubts, however, is the lack of any apparent motive. There was evidently no history of spousal abuse, nor of previous violent acts on MacDonald's part, nor of any nucleus in family dynamics for a murderous outburst. There is a sizable hole in the film where motive should be. The book and the film, despite some revisionist statements I've read, convince me that MacDonald probably did it. His alibi is almost impossible to swallow. Still -- I wouldn't have wanted to be on the jury.

When I first saw this movie over 10 years ago, it convinced me of MacDonald's guilt. I saw it again last night and this time I'm not so sure.

This movie is looking more and more like a propaganda film, intended to cement the audience's hatred of MacDonald, and convince the audience that he is, indeed, guilty. That's quite frightening -- what if it's not the only one like this? What if many Hollywood movies are, in fact, propaganda? Isn't that what we accused certain dictators of making over the past 100 century.

After I watched last night's showing, I went to MacDonald's website. Yes, I know, if I'm worried about "propaganda", I have to view his site with skepticism too. And I did. Yet I couldn't help coming to an uneasy conclusion: if MacDonald really is guilty, why is he so willing to have his DNA tested?

After all, if you are guilty of murder -- and knowing that mitochondrial DNA testing is highly accurate today -- you know for a fact that if you agree to DNA testing, you will be caught. Yet MacDonald is willing to go ahead with it. Sorry, but I just can not shirk the nagging feeling that this means he is convinced of his own innocence (notice I said "convinced" -- it may well be that he did indeed commit the murders, but is so horrified about them that they are now part of his repressed memory and he, in fact, believes he did not commit them!).

The other thing that disturbs me is that the North Carolina prosecutors themselves seem very reluctant to allow full DNA testing. For instance, they are willing to allow nuclear DNA (requiring a larger sample size) or mitochondrial DNA testing, but not both.

Why not? Wouldn't you, as a prosecutor, want to exhaust every possible avenue to find a killer? How can there be such a thing as "too much" information when trying to solve a murder? I find this disturbing. In fact, combined with MacDonald's willingness to undergo DNA testing, I find the prosecutors' reluctance to be evidence that they are far less than certain that they convicted the right man for the crime. Perhaps the prosecutors have something to hide?

In conclusion, I must also agree with another writer that perhaps the most perplexing (and disturbing) aspect of this case that alludes to MacDonald's innocence is the apparent lack of motive. There seems to be no financial nor love-triangle motivation for MacDonald to kill his family.

There is a phenomenon known as "family annihilators", men who kill their entire family because they sense impending ruin (usually financial), and feel that their family can not survive without them. In their misguided way, these men believe they are doing their family a favour by killing them, saving them from the misery that follows financial ruin. However, these men invariably break down in court and completely confess to such crimes. MacDonald didn't do that. So that explanation is likely out of the picture for him, especially since the movie does not portray him as facing imminent financial ruin.

Sometime later in 2002 the full mitochondrial DNA test will be performed. Stay tuned; the results will have significant ramifications. If, in fact, the test results cast doubt on MacDonald's guilt, the producers of "Fatal Vision" will have a lot of explaining to do ...

I remember being riveted by this movie when it first appeared on TV in 1984. It was a really well done TV movie, especially the acting by Gary Cole. As far as McDonalds guilt goes, I really don't know, but the film will make you lean towards definite guilt. The one question is why? Those children being brutally slain goes beyond comprehension. The movie gave me a real feeling of being there by capturing the mood of the late sixties-early seventies. If McDonald was a true sociopath this film did an over the top job of presenting it. To this day McDonald vehemently denies his guilt and actively pursues legal routes to free himself from jail. I'm waiting for the DVD release, and I think I'll be waiting a long time. I have the rare laserdisc which will have to do.