REVIEW - GIDEON'S ARMY

Monstrous acts and monstrous opinions beget monstrous laws, which form monstrous legal systems. Gideon's Army is about the men who battle that monster of a system in the US, where you'll receive a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison, without parole, if one person can convince a few others that you committed armed robbery in pursuit of petty change. Regardless of whom or what they may or may not have abused, one look at one such prisoner behind the bars and bullet-proof plastic and you wonder how it can be right or just or legal to do that to any human being. Dawn Porter's documentary about three public defenders is led by its heart. It seeks not to accuse nor to indict any of its criminal or potentially criminal subjects, but in its honest, and indeed heartfelt, portrait of the lives and work of these defence attorneys, it indicts the US criminal justice system instead. Porter's message is strong but not too strenuously put, though the degree of insight she achieves is weak. There's nothing exceptional about the cases she studies here; that's the point, perhaps, that seemingly banal trials on film can be shattering experiences for those involved, but a closer view of that involvement would have allowed Porter to make her message felt even stronger. The climactic sequence is a condensed account of one such trial, which also is far from exceptional, but Dawn must have known that I love a courtroom scene in a movie, and a 15-minute one is even better. The film is technically spare, which is no bother - what are a bother are the occasional attempts at imbuing Gideon's Army with a more professional touch here and there, which are misguided.