The Accused (1988)
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
Out drinking one night after a fight with her boyfriend, three men brutally rape Sarah Tobias in a bar while people watch and cheer. District Attorney Kathryn Murphy takes the case; however, she allows the rapists to receive a mild sentence. A distraught Sarah decides to seek punishment for the men who witnessed and encouraged the rape. To get justice, Sarah must take the stand and revisit the night of her attack.
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What critics compared The Accused to
It made me think of Carol Clover’s comment in Men, Women and Chain Saws that Jonathan Demme’s 1988 prestige rape-revenge thriller The Accused “ends where many women’s fear beings, at the moment the jury delivers the guilty verdict” and that “its implication that the story is over when the men are sentenced is pure Pollyanaism.”
In 1988, The Accused came along, bringing the legal struggles of survivors to the forefront of the narrative, making the rape-revenge films that came before it culturally obsolete.
The cheaply constructed catharsis born from masculine perspectives and their attempts to navigate a woman’s emotional experiences in response to rape and sexual assault ranges from well intentioned exploitation such as I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) or any number of high-profile dramatic representations in morbid, if effective melodramas ( The Accused ; Death and the Maiden , Elle , etc.).
William threatens Jeremy not to consider Gloria another "notch on your belt" ("I'm beltless," he protests, weakly); John is horrified but goes along when Kathleen make him "feel her hooters"; Gloria's middle-of-the-night bondage scene makes Jeremy feel "like Jodie Foster in The Accused"; and eventually, a drunken Jeremy confesses his growing affection for Gloria to Father Gibson (Henry Gibson), after all ("Maybe I'm a little crazy").
Wilson is as blandly charming and recessive as in The Life Aquatic; with drunk-auctioneer delivery of lines like "The proper girl in the hat just eye-fucked the shit out of me," the perpetually riled Vaughn can generate a modicum of goodwill, one immediately negated by lines like "I felt like Jodie Foster in The Accused last night."
Likewise, Jodie Foster made two movies like this, The Accused (1988), for which she won an Oscar, and The Brave One (2007).
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Not that a rape-revenge flick should be “fun” but Elle didn’t quite have the sleazy exploitation stank of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, nor did it have the intense laser-focus of Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused.
As in movies like "Boys Don't Cry" or "The Accused," "Elephant" exists in an atmosphere of queasy anticipation of the atrocity you know is coming at the end.
This is an odd movie, traversing "The Accused" territory one minute and ''Smokey and the Bandit" the next.
Even Foster's performance, good as it is, skirts self-parody when it recalls some of her other pictures (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Nell) by positing her as some kind of middlebrow authentication of earnest female self-empowerment.