West of Memphis

Though the name Damien Wayne Echols is now a commonly known one and the West Memphis Three something of a household issue even here, worlds away from Arkansas, these weren’t the terms that drew me to this title. No, the names that did that were those of producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, talking head’s Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins and of course seeing that Nick Cave and Warren Ellis had written the score certainly helped. Normally seeing a film for this sort of reason, for the people in those sorts of positions, is a mistake; you need to be interested in the story or the characters, everything else is too slight to truly satisfy. Here though, in West of Memphis, that kind of approach is actually rewarded, those supports are made as much into characters as the supposed criminals themselves, theirs is the story that it actually tells and because of that it almost manages to transcend simply being another true crime documentary.