2024-03-29 16:39:44
Behind the truth – 5 points
The Good MotherUnited States, 2023
Address: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
Script: Madison Harrison y Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
Duration: 90 minutes
Interpreters: Hilary Swank, Olivia Cooke, Jack Reynor, Dilone, Hopper Penn, Norm Lewis, Madison Harrison.
Premiere in theaters.
In cinema, the distance between dignity and failure can be minimal. Not to mention the successa goal always for few, but only the merit of getting a film to deliver at least one motive, an excuse not to only say about it that it is failed, mediocre, unfortunate, inconsequential or just bad. It can be a technical achievement, a detail in the plot, the construction of a character and even a scene or sequence that saves it from the purgatory of adjectives. Sometimes, as in the case of Behind the truth, third film by American Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, That difference is made by a name: that of the actress Hilary Swank.
It is true that it is not only the name of the double winner of the Oscar for Best Actress for his work in Boys don’t cry (Kimberley Pierce, 1999) y Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004) which makes that difference. Rather, it is his ability to put on the shoulder this police officer that doesn’t start badly, but as it progresses it begins to trastabillar with its own plot and staging, like someone who decides to go running with his shoelaces untied.
Swank plays Marissa, a journalist whose best years are behind her. She is a tough woman who finds it difficult to leave the house to go to the newsroom and, once there, it is not easy for her to bond with her colleagues, from whom she is obviously separated. generational issues. During a summary meeting, his eldest son, a police officer, comes to inform him that the youngest was the victim of a murder linked to drug trafficking. A blow that deepens his emotional crisis.
The plot also involves a young pregnant daughter-in-law, whom Marissa blames for her dead son’s problems. But the tragedy will end up uniting them and together they begin to look for clues that will help find the person responsible for the crime. Swank gets it roughness and fragility They coexist convincingly within Marissa, allowing guilt to emerge between the folds of that friction. With those elements, Behind the truth urde un dirty police with a social landscape in ruins in the background, in which marginality is around the impoverished middle class.
In the last third the film accelerates, rushing to reach a twist in the script whose surprise is perceived artificial, as if it were an obligation aggravated by gender. This and other decisions aim to adjust the tension of the scenes, but instead make them implausible, violating the principle of suspension of disbelief, fundamental to making the gears of cinema work. The only thing that remains intact until the end, supporting what the film has left of dignity, is her: Hilary Swank.