The story is pretty simple and the case is well known so I won't go into narrative details. I haven't read the book or seen the other TV version so can only go on what appears on the screen here. I only have a few comments.
1. The Menendez Brothers. Embodying the anomi common to California suburbs, they slaughter their parents to get rid of their authoritarian father and to get their parents' money. The younger of the two brothers, Erik, is weak. The other, Lyle, is the instigator of the act. Erik is forced by Dad to practice his sports strenuously in order to get into college. Lyle, having gone through the same basic training, gets into Princeton but goofs off, cheats, and is thrown out. The first thing they do after offing Mom and Dad is to give up any idea of going to college -- why should I have to learn the names of all fourteen planets? -- although they're content to continue with their athletic pursuits between spending sprees and parties. Actually, the next thing they do is throw a monstrously big bash on Dad's money, then they buy some thirteen-thousand dollars worth of wrist watches and a Porsche. Lyle buys a non-modish restaurant in Princeton with the intention of turning it into a nouvelle cuisine kind of tony place. (They need it in Princeton. When I lived there, they had only a crummy pizza palace and an expensive French restaurant, Lahiere's, patronized only by faculty.) Just a couple of innocent boys. It isn't surprising that the ethnic background of this upper middle class family was Cuban. Some of the Hispanic neighborhoods in northern cities can be troublesome if you don't know your way around, but the Cuban neighborhoods were an exception. Many of the residents were professional and/or wealthy refugees from Castro's Cuba and they brought their genteel norms with them. The two kids aren't as smart as they think they are, though. They get mixed up with a shady shrink, who squeals on them to his girl friend, who in turn squeals to the police, before the shrink himself squeals to the police. They also tell one of their friends, who also squeals to the police, after talking it over with a lawyer. (These are the kind of people who "have" lawyers, as in, "I'll have to talk it over with my lawyer.")
2. The Doc. Dr. Jerome Oziel, a clinical psychologist specializing in adjustment disorders of the rich, has an office in Beverly Hills. I know something about clinical psychologists. The vast majority are honorable and ethical individuals whose genuine desire is to help. But all of them are human too, and not without flaws, especially considered as a professional organization. Until 1946 there was no general agreement on who could or could not put up a shingle and call themselves "psychologists." (We are all psychologists in our own folksy ways.) The American Psychological Association came to the aid of the public by announcing that, since there was such existing confusion, they, the APA, would solve the problem by confining the name to those individuals who had met the qualifications specified by the APA. In other words, somebody is a psychologist only if we say he is. This often happens in professions where a service is offered for a fee. (That's your doctor's way of saying "money changes hands.") None of this has to do with quality control, a simple problem. It's guild-hall unionism, otherwise known as a closed shop. By any standard, Oziel is a bust. He's boffing his girl friend and involves her in his rather dangerous situation while he's treating the Menendez brothers. (He's not supposed to talk about it with friends, see. That's an ethical violation, but nobody cares because he's a made man in the profession.) He even threatens his girl friend for not cooperating in his management of the case. She in turn sues him. (What a litigious bunch.) After the murders, Oziel, who is probably balling one or more clients, and who can certainly smell money and publicity in a high-profile case like this, smoothly manipulates his clients into spilling their stories on a tape which winds up, somehow, being played in court. He is shown practically salivating over the prospect of having his fifteen minutes of fame. His comments on the case, insofar as we get to hear them, are the sort of bunkum that has fewer penetrating insights than a Dear Abbey column.
3. Leslie Abramson, defense counsel. She and Dr. Oziel would understand one another intuitively. F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that it was impossible to write a screenplay for Joan Crawford because if you gave her a stage direction such as telling a lie, she would give an imitation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British. Abramson has the same problem with overacting. She constantly rolls her eyes at the audience and mugs during testimony by the prosecution's witnesses, until at last the judge admonishes her, and THEN she spits back indignant arguments at Hizzonor. The real Abramson could never have played herself on screen; her hystrionics would have been much too ripe for the average viewer. Her summation is as much about herself as about her client. Who could possibly read a line like, "When this ordeal began, he turned to me because I was the only friend he had," and make it sound believable, let alone dignified?
4. The trial per se. I taught a seminar in courtroom behavior and will keep this short by summing up what we learned during that course: Much of everything bad you believe about the jury system is true. Who gets treated lightly by the jury? Well, you can just about guess: the young, the handsome, the well-groomed, the confident, the well-spoken, the female, and in general the defendants who most resemble the jury in race, ethnic and class background. It was a serious tactical mistake for Detective Arguello, when asked about whether Lyle should be permitted to wear his hairpiece in court, to shrug and say, "Let 'im wear it." The rug made Lyle look younger and more handsome. A few strands of fake hair might have altered the outcome of the case. One disadvantage that the victims suffer from in a murder trial is that they are not there because they happen to be dead. As a result, we hear only one side of the story. Abramson and the rest of the defense were well aware of this and concocted the sort of story which, since then, has come to be known as "the abuse excuse." Now, even Allen Dershowitz hates it. Lyle weeps on the stand, on cue, as he describes what his father did to him before he turned five years old, when it got really serious. (The fact is, the neuronal circuits aren't fully developed much before the age of five, so no one can remember much of what went on, certainly not without an unmeasurable admixture of fantasy.) Erik is thought to be "cute," and "sensitive" by the young groupies carrying signs in his support outside the courtroom. The defense turns the case into a trial in which Dad is the defendant. (Nothing much is said about why it was necessary to shoot Mom ten times or so with the shotgun.)
As the movie ends, the jury is deadlocked and a mistrial declared. On retrial, the new jury having been "inoculated" against defense tactics, convicted the two.
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