This post contains spoilers for the plot of Secret In Their Eyes.
Secret In Their Eyes, the American crime film starring Julia Roberts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Nicole Kidman, takes viewers back to the time immediately after 9/11, when Americans were deeply suspicious about Muslims. In an early scene, an out-of focus character mumbles “Muslim…terrorists…” It’s just a moment of background chatter, political window-dressing, but it’s an ugly moment.
As the movie premiered immediately after the Paris attacks, amid similar paranoia and fear — while politicians are calling for religious litmus tests and extreme surveillance of U.S. mosques — it seems like it couldn’t come at a more perfect time. It’s disappointing, then, that the movie ultimately fails to live up to its promise, falling back on easy stereotypes and avoiding engaging with the deeper questions it raises.
The post-9/11 setting brings the atmosphere of political uncertainty and shifting security priorities home to an American audience. But the film’s political origins are much different: It’s a remake of El secreto de sus ojos, the Juan Campanella film of the same name. That film is set during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” a time when people were “disappeared” and justice was an abstract concept.
The Argentine original is told in two timelines: One showing a law officer’s investigation of a 1974 rape and murder case, and the other showing his revisiting of that same case 25 years later as the subject of his novel. The film won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2010 and grossed $6.4 million in the United States alone — making it a bona fide foreign film hit (by contrast, Ida, this year’s winner, grossed $3.8 million).
All of which points to a pressing question: Did this movie really need to be remade a mere five years later? And considering the fact that it clearly connected with American audiences the first time, did it really need to be reframed in a specifically American context?
Sometimes, reworking a foreign film works — The Birdcage and The Descendents are popular examples. Remakes tend to work best when the director takes the source material and adds something meaningful to it; after all, there needs to be a compelling reason for the film to exist in addition to the original. But far more often, remakes are transparent cash-grabs — attempts to reuse an idea that’s already been proven, remove any language or cultural barriers, and repackage it for mainstream box-office success.
Director Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass, Captain Phillips) takes Juan Campanella’s lush, disturbing Argentine film and Americanizes it by making it bleaker and more heavy-handed. By changing the setting to Los Angeles immediately after 9/11, Ray deliberately chooses a time when Americans were eager to compromise their civil freedoms and ideals for the promise of safety. But one of his transpositions falls flat. Rewriting a foreign film in order to cast the American villain as Muslim is a disappointing move.
In Secret In Their Eyes, whether law enforcement’s targets are the would-be terrorists in the mosque or the murderous snitch, they’re all Muslim. In casting the ubiquitous political bogeyman villain of the time, the film contributes to the simple understanding of villainy that plagues public rhetoric.
When movies and TV shows cast Muslims as the bad guys again and again, they contribute to Islamophobia by building a learned association that if you see a Muslim character, you’d better watch out — a dangerous stereotype that bleeds out of our televisions and into our debate on Syrian refugees and treatment of Muslim Americans. It props up a misguided sense that only Muslim terrorists target innocent civilians (a patently false statement recently made by GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee) — when actually, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2015, the majority of terrorism deaths in the West since 9/11 were caused by political extremists, including white-supremacists. This false — and popular — rhetoric has its roots in the entertainment diet Americans have been consuming since 9/11, part of the tragedy’s long, complicated shadow.
Like the original, this new film is told in two timelines. The first timeline focuses on a law enforcement office working to prevent the “next 9/11” by round-the-clock surveillance of an LA mosque. When the daughter of one of the officers — Jess, Julia Robert’s character — is discovered raped and murdered in a dumpster next to the mosque, justice for the girl takes a backseat to national security. This is especially true when Ray, Chiwetel Ejiofer’s character, is convinced that the killer is a valuable informant from inside the mosque. He’s warned off by superiors and ultimately, law officials destroy physical evidence to make sure their snitch stays free. Yet the evidence of the killer’s guilt is largely coincidental, turning a clear question of priorities into a much murkier situation.
In the Argentine film, the killer is deduced from a series of photographs from the victim’s home town. He’s captured, charged, then released in a staggering show of political corruption. In the American version, the killer is deduced from one photograph at a company picnic — and has met the victim just once before, which makes their connection far more tenuous. It’s also far less realistic. The vast majority of sexual assault offenders know their victims. Coupled with the close relationship the victim had with the agents of justice, Ray’s dogged and largely illegal pursuit looks more like a questionable example of justice thwarted.
There is an interesting American weight, however, to killer’s tenuous legal guilt (he confesses, but isn’t charged, and the physical evidence literally goes up in flames) in the final twist of the film. Jess reveals to Ray that he should stop looking for the killer, because she killed him 13 years ago to get justice for her daughter. Something about her confession, though, rings hollow for Ray — and he sneaks back onto her property to see her bringing food into an outbuilding. It’s a makeshift prison where she has imprisoned her daughter’s killer, without trial, for 13 years.
“A life sentence,” she says. “For you too,” her former partner replies, looking horrified.
It’s implied that Jess can’t move on from her daughter’s murder until she lets the murderer go in some form or another. But by keeping him imprisoned, she’s compromised her ideals, her happiness, her future, and herself. It’s a clear nod to Guantanamo Bay, where America has similarly imprisoned people for years — people whom we are sure have perpetrated crimes against America’s children — without giving them a trial.
But instead of lingering on the weighty questions of whether justice can be served, what form it should take, and whether serving justice actually does any good for victims or their family — or makes us any more safe — the movie takes an easy way out. Jess shoots the killer, then tentatively smiles. Even the slimy police officer who torched the original evidence is karmically punished.
And in the end, that’s the problem with this movie: The threads come together a little too neatly, the metaphors are a little too apt, and the post 9/11 setting seems chosen not out of any desire to genuinely examine the fear, the mistakes, and the lessons of that time, but because it’s the closest match to the political corruption of the original with the smallest stretch for its American audience. And since it doesn’t dwell enough on its changed context to draw lingering connections for the audience, ultimately this rewrite plays into the empathy gap, filtering every story told to Americans through the context of America, instead of trusting audiences to grapple with something less familiar.