This trait leads to a courtroom scene of rare fascination. We've seen a lot of courtrooms in the movies, and almost always we know what to expect. The witnesses will tell the truth or lie, they will be effective or not, and suspense will build if the film is skillful. "A Map of the World" puts Alice Goodwin in the witness box, and she says the wrong thing in the wrong way for reasons that seem right to her but nobody else. She'd rather be self-righteous than acquitted.
This quality makes her a fascinating person, in one of the best performances Weaver has given. We can't take our eyes off her. She is not the plaything or the instrument of the plot. She fights off the plot, indeed: The movement of the film is toward truth and resolution, but she hasn't read the script and is driven by anger and a deep wronged stubbornness. She begins to speak, and we feel enormous suspense. We care for her. We don't want her to damage her own case.
The plot involves her in a situation that depends on two unexpected developments, and I don't feel like revealing either one. Neither one is her fault, morally, but bad things happen all the same. She's smart enough to see why she's not to blame for the first event, but human enough to feel terrible about it, anyway. And the second development is sort of a combination of the first, plus her own big mouth. Her family is terrified. Her husband doesn't know what to make of her, and her kids don't have the comfort of thinking of their mom as an innocent in an unfair world, because she doesn't act like a victim--she acts like a woman who plans to win the game in the last quarter.
There are good performances all through the movie, which was directed by Scott Elliott and written by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt, based on Jane Hamilton's popular novel. David Strathairn plays Howard, Alice's husband, and Julianne Moore and Ron Lea play their farm neighbors--just about their only friends. When Alice spends time in prison, she gets a hard time from an inmate (Aunjanue Ellis), who senses (correctly) that this woman may have dug her own grave. And there is a small but crucial role for Chloe Sevigny, who in several recent movies ("Boys Don't Cry," "julien donkey-boy" and the upcoming "American Psycho") shows an intriguing range. As for Julianne Moore, see Stanley Kauffmann's praise in a recent New Republic review, where he finds her grief "a small gem of truthful heartbreak." The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules. It breaks into parts. It seems to be a family story, and then turns into a courtroom drama, and then into a prison story, and there is intercutting with romantic intrigue, and there aren't any of the comforting payoffs we get in genre fiction. I'm grateful for movies like this; "Being John Malkovich" and "Three Kings," so different in every other way, resemble "A Map of the World" in being free--in being capable of taking any turn at any moment, without the need to follow tired conventions. And in Sigourney Weaver, the movie has a heroine who would be a lot happier if she weren't so smart. Now there's a switch.
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