A Cry in the Dark.

WITH The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Fred Schepisi had proved himself one of the most startlingly new directors since the New Wave. Leaving Australia for America, he floundered a bit (although Barbarosa was not without interest), but with A Cry in the Dark, he emerges as both a master of his medium and the kind of artist almost unknown these days: a true humanist, who would save mankind from itselL Hopeless as his hope may be, he has the artistry and endurance to give it a living and lasting form.

The film is the true story of an Australian Seventh-Day Adventist pastor and his wife, Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, who, with their two little boys and baby girl, were vacationing at Ayers Rock in 1980. At a moonlight barbecue with another couple at their campsite, the Chamberlains heard a cry from their tent, where the younger boy and baby Azaria were sleeping. Lindy hurried back; glimpsed a dingo (a wild Australian dog) rushing out and vanishing into the wilderness; found some blood but no baby in the tent. A search by campers, aborigines living nearby, and, eventually, police yielded no more than some dingo footprints near the tent. An inquest totally exculpated the Chamberlains.

Much later, Azaria's clothes were found in the wilds, torn, bloodied, and neatly folded (clearly because their stupid discoverer put them back that way), although a knitted jacket was missing. Testimony by questionable forensic experts and the belief that a dingo could not carry so heavy a load that far (the aborigines knew better) caused the reopening of the case: Lindy was charged with murder, Michael with being an accessory after the fact. All of Australia was agog as over no previous trial. Despite a patently sympathetic judge, the couple, who were tried as much by the media and the public as by the jury, were found guilty. Lindy was sentenced to life, Michael was given a suspended sentence, so as to be able to take care of the boys and a new girl baby, born in prison and snatched from her mother despite a petition to let her keep the child for a while.

Three and a half years later, when further evidence came to light, Lind was released; but only last September did a high court clear the Chamberlains of all charges. They still have to convince many of their fellow countrymen of their innocence. The reason they persist in trying is encapsulated in the film's last line, which Schepisi shoots brilliantly, and which may be the most haunting utterance with which any movie ever left us; I leave you to discover it for yourselves.

The prosecution never tried to establish a motive for child murder in this manifestly close-knit, child-loving family. The unstated implication (it was voiced abundantly in cross-country gossip) was some bizarre rite of human sacrifice demanded by the Adventist Church. The principal reasons for the verdict were hatred for a little-known, fundamentalist religion; the seeming imperturbability of the couple and their willingness to discuss the case on TV and in the press; the popularity of the dingo as a national mascot; and various forms of legal incompetence, though not on the part of the judge, who clearly considered Lindy innocent. And, of course, encompassing everything, human stupidity and malevolence.

The Chamberlains, however hurt and grieving, believed in the will of God-even though, eventually, Michael lost his faith and gave up the ministry, as the film wrenchingly shows. Lindy and her Bible remained inseparable. Such faith strikes people nowadays as alien and suspect; Aussies were giving credence to a rumor that the very name Azaria meant "sacrifice to God." The media first conned the Chamberlains into cooperating under the pretext of helping the search for the baby; later, these victims of yellow journalism thought they could use the media for their vindication, a procedure for which the media have extraordinarily little stomach. Dingos, of course, are wild beasts, despite their lovable aspect; and that Lindy is not a warmly effusive woman, that she showed remarkable toughness under questioning, that she did not cry much at her trial, should hardly constitute evidence of guilt.

What is masterly about the film is that, in a mere two hours, the screenplay by Schepisi and Robert Caswell manages to touch upon any number of private and public aspects of this tragedy, which is both that of unjustly suffering individuals and that of mass hysteria and general benightedness. Schepisi ingeniously keeps the story in double focus: both on how it felt to those enmeshed in it, and on how it looked to the media, the police, the outsiders. He keeps inserting tiny vignettes showing how diverse people in a great variety of situations reacted to the case-mostly obtusely, and often obscenely. At the same time, having instructed every actor to enact his character as if motivated by the best of faiths, Schepisi was able to portray honest but horrible human stupidity with unsurpassable sharpness.

Aside from a hair-raising story, rivetingly told, there is-inconspicuous, and all the more affecting for it-Schepisi's superb technique. You have to be two ,persons watching this film: one for the plot and dialogue, the other for the sovereign cinematic know-how. I solved the problem by seeing the film twice. The camera placements and movements could serve as exemplars for any film course. Thus helicopter shots from a nose-mounted camera immerse us in the principal locations on the run, as it were; wideangle lenses keep straining to catch more, more searchingly, more bewilderingly. For bewilderment is of the essence here. Even the cogent alternation of close-ups and long or extreme long shots serves to evoke bewilderment on both intimate and public levels: we keep shuttling between the puzzled and anguished protagonist couple and the, with rare exceptions, unfeeling or hostile cast of millions.

How imaginatively, for example, Schepisi and his gifted longtime collaborator, the cinematographer Ian Baker, use Ayers Rock, that awesome monolith, as a visual refrain and emotional leitmotif. Often between what might be called acts of the drama, in harsh light or falling dusk, the camera flies furiously toward that natural wonder: holy to the aborigines, unholy to the Chamberlains' detractors, a Mecca for tourists, and a memento of horror for the parents. It is as if the latters' consciousness, their inner eyes, were irresistibly drawn to that cynosure; ironically, cynosure is Greek for dog's tail, or the rear view of a dingo heading for the dark. Or consider how magisterially shots of Azaria and of the dingo bursting from the nocturnal tent (was there or was there not a baby in its maw?) are intercut with the sequence of Lindy under cross-examination: the counterpoint of speed and stasis, of night and courtroom glare, objectities the assault on her by the D.A. ftom without and by her memory from within.

Particularly subtle, often almost subliminal, is the recording of the tribulations and final triumph of conjugal love under trials greater than a mere tribunal-even one disposing over life and death-can inflict. The incisiveness of these scenes owes a lot to the performances. Sam Neill's is a vivid embodiment of Michael's mixed emotions toward God, wife, and mankind: of befuddlement, bitterness, and severely shaken but unshattered endurance. Even more astonishing is Meryl Streep's Lindy, not least for mastery of a difficult accent, but most for making this well-nigh granitic woman sympathetic without resorting to any sympathy-stealing device, despite plentiful opportunity to do so. As she proved in Iron weed, Miss Streep is of all our leading ladies the least vain about her appearance; here, even more touchingly, she conveys the depredations of inner anguish on outer comeliness. But by never visibly trying to move us, she moves us all the more.

To cover vast ground, the film must rocket forward; this, with all the often complex details and (to our ears) outlandish accents, makes it hard, though not impossible, to follow. But with such a director, such principals, and such a supporting cast-no one among these scores of people displays an iota of actorishness-the rewards for concentration are lavish. Consider the masterly way in which Schepisi conveys chaos in the crowd scenes, how the submersion of the principals in the multitude, the heterogeneous concurrent actions, the Draconianly cut short takes fitted together with a soupcon of disjointedness allow confusion to make its masterpiece. And notice how the camera will move in the opposite direction from the actors to crystallize the depaysement.

No less fine is the technique in the private scenes: Lindy and Michael talking to each other stiffly, fumblingly across a room, or casually from one room to another. Or there will be one-liners delivered on the wing by someone flitting by, or shots so briefly held that their impact registers on top of that of the next sequence, or kinetic balances where a camera movement from left to right is complemented by one from right to left. How much, for instance, is told by a tight shot of two hands failing to clutch each other as Michael rejects Lindy, contrasted with a later one where they are defiantly clasped.

What to me, as an unbeliever, is particularly eye-opening is the variety of roles religion plays in this movie. For A Cry in the Dark is, among many other things, one of the most transcendent religious films since Monsieur Vincent and God Needs Men, which is saying a lot.