Marlene: The Muddled Melodrama of The Woman Behind Steven Truscott
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
Given the renewed urgency to tell more stories of unsung women, there’s a good case for chronicling one woman’s role in righting one of Canada’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. The new docudrama Marlene, from Canadian director and co-writer Wendy Hill-Tout, aims to fill that gap as an inspirational legal thriller about the wife of Steven Truscott.
In 1959, 14-year-old Truscott was convicted and sentenced to hang, later commuted to life imprisonment, for the rape and murder of his classmate, 12-year-old Lynne Harper, near Clinton, Ontario.
The case became a major legal and media story through the 1960s. There was a Supreme Court judgement against an appeal, and a bestselling book by journalist Isabel LeBourdais arguing for Truscott’s innocence. The Truscott story even led to the end of the CBC flagship news show This Hour Has Seven Days, after host Laurier LaPierre was fired for weeping on air. Truscott was released on parole in 1969.
In the decades since, this cruelly sensational story — of one child murdered and another threatened with state execution — has been treated in film, song, novel, and drama. The central figure in this story, Truscott, laid low, got married and raised a family under and assumed name. He didn’t surface until 2000, when he was interviewed as part of CBC’s The Fifth Estate investigation of the original trial.
A subsequent book by the show’s producer Julian Sher raised more doubts about the conviction. That led to an appeal which introduced new forensic evidence and concluded key evidence had been suppressed at the original trial. Forty-nine years after his conviction, Truscott was acquitted and subsequently awarded $6.5-million and an apology by the Ontario attorney general.
It seems reasonable to say that Marlene Truscott, who researched the case obsessively for a half-century, was an essential and unsung figure in Truscott’s exoneration. For all its good intentions, the film that bears her name is a melodramatic muddle, a flashback-loaded, over-orchestrated, and confusing legal story wrapped in a gauzy romance story.
The titular character is played, as a young firebrand, by Julia Sarah Stone, who falls for one of Canada’s best-known criminals while he’s still in jail and starts a petition to have him released. When he steps outside of a car for the first time, she decides he looks like “a young James Dean” and is her “destiny.”
In middle age, Marlene is played Kristin Booth, a folksy sister-in-justice to Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, recognizable through fashion changes and by her brown hair helmet. Truscott is played by three actors, but principally by Greg Bryk as the older, handsome, passive Truscott, who grins appreciatively at his intense spouse and fervent champion. “I can’t let you go to your grave a convicted murderer!” she declaims. He goes along with it.
As a rule — whether in tragedy or a good detective story — an emotionally wrenching story requires a cold eye to organize events in a meaningful fashion. That's the opposite of what we get here. For all the attention to Marlene’s obsessive research, with the de rigueur A Beautiful Mind-style charts on her wall, it’s difficult to figure out what she figured out and when.
Repeated slo-mo sequences of the young Marlene spinning amidst falling leaves (with news of Truscott’s release) or the older Marlene swimming laps in the pool while having flashbacks, tell us little except that she was having a lot of emotions.
For a more coherent look on the Truscott case, I suggest checking out the original Fifth Estate episode on YouTube. There are enough lurid dramatic re-enactments in the episode that it almost works as a docudrama itself, but it’s useful to sort through some of the contradictory eyewitness testimony from various children and the problematic forensic evidence.
Marlene Truscott doesn't get much camera time, but she comes across, not just determined, but also incisive and well-organized, qualities this drama should have emulated.
Marlene. Directed by Wendy Hill-Tout. Written by Wendy Hill-Tout and Cathy Ostlere. Starring Kristin Booth, Greg Bryk, and Julia Sarah Stone. Opens in select theatres April 8.