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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2012Errol Morris, the extraordinary documentarian, is perhaps best known for The Thin Blue Line , his film about the unjustly convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams. The film was responsible for Adams' release from prison (although he has never been legally exonerated) within a couple of years of the film's release in 1988.
Now he attempts to do a similar thing in this recent book, "A Wilderness of Error". Morris has become convinced of the innocence of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald in a famous murder case which has inspired at least two other important books, ( Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer .) MacDonald, who has insisted on his innocence from the very beginning of the horrific tale of the vicious murder of his wife and children in 1972, has been in prison since his conviction in 1979, vainly pursuing appeal after appeal.
Morris is infinitely patient, examining each shred of evidence and reassembling interviews and transcripts into a coherent thread which eventually reveals a carefully knit fabric of certainty about the unfairness of the original trials. In The Thin Blue Line the technique is riveting, as Morris circles through interviews, recreations and contemporaneous material slowly building to his conclusion, by which time the viewer, having been seduced into rapt attention, is thoroughly convinced of Adams' innocence. It is a thrilling and compelling movie, well worth taking the time to watch, especially as it is so conveniently available to rent now.
He is no less patient in this painstaking evidentiary compendium of a book, but, alas, the dry prose of hearing transcripts, and the interviews soliciting the 40-year-old memories of many of the participants is more tedious and demanding than one would wish. Perhaps Morris' doggedness doesn't translate into suspense on the page as well as it does on film. By the end of the book one is quite convinced that MacDonald was not fairly convicted, but this reader has yet to be convinced of his innocence. Of course it is a non-trivial feat that has been accomplished by Morris, and his work may again play a part in the release of a murderer, who has been granted grounds for a re-examination of the evidence in the case, making this an important book to be sure, but, alas, not a terribly readable book.
