Secret In Their Eyes is a procedural thriller crossed with a revenge flick wrapped up in a metaphor for 9/11, a rather bewildering combination that never quite coheres.
We open on Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor), plopped in front of his computer, scrolling through face after face in a database of some sort. A criminal database, by the looks of it: row after row of mug shots flash by. Eyes bleary, Ray goes back and forth, scanning for one face in particular, as the camera bounces around, looking at the detritus on his desk, the gun in his drawer. Once a lawman, always a lawman.
Then Ray sees the face he’s looking for. Thinks he does, anyway. He’s sure enough that he prints out the guy’s mug shot and takes it with him across the country from New York to L.A. Now the head of security for the Mets, Ray used to be in counterterrorism, where he worked with the current DA of L.A., Claire (Nicole Kidman) and crack investigator Jess (Julia Roberts). That partnership came to an end after Jess’ daughter was found brutally murdered—her body left like garbage in a dumpster, "bleached inside and out" to erase any DNA evidence—and the case went unfinished, the criminal unpunished.
Unfinished, unpunished—but not unsolved. Ray, Jess, and Claire know who committed the crime. They’re pretty sure, anyway. Mostly sure. Sure enough that when he ducks the charges and then disappears, Ray quits the force in disgust, Claire tries to forget it all, and Jess goes a little bit mad.
We see Jess’ tragedy in flashbacks. Half the film is set in 2002, months after the 9/11 attacks when counterterror was the only thing law enforcement was worried about; the other half in the present day. It’s a conscious choice by writer/director Billy Ray, who adapted the film from an Argentine production with its own political backdrop. In the fog of war—America’s war on terror, Argentina’s dirty war—the authorities sometimes lose their bearings, confuse their priorities.
Perhaps the metaphor made more sense in the original (I haven’t seen it and wouldn’t know anyway, not being an expert on Argentina), but it doesn’t make a great deal of sense here. To explain why, though, we must examine the movie’s closing minutes. So let’s pick up after the photo in order to give the spoiler-averse a moment to close the tab.
As the movie draws to a close, we discover that Ray did not have the right guy after all. And Jess knew he did not have the right guy after all that whole time. Because Jess had the right guy that whole time locked in a shed behind her house.
Jess is a big believer in life imprisonment over the death penalty. And when she realized that her boss in the counterterrorism department was more interested in what their suspect—who also happened to be a source in a mosque who claimed to have access to a sleeper cell—could give them in the war on terror than making him pay for her daughter’s murder, she took matters into her own hands. Not via a bullet and a shallow grave. But via imprisonment. In a barn behind her house. For 13 years.
"You look a million years old," Ray says to Jess after he discovers the bearded, stuttering, broken human she has secretly locked away in her own personal Gitmo. He then removes his gun from his holster and places it on a table before grabbing a shovel and heading in the backyard to dig a grave. Jess takes him up on the offer and puts down the monster living in her backyard.
On one level here the metaphor here is quite obvious: Waging endless war and refusing to let go of the past is like a prison you put yourself in. It’s quite deep in a shallow sort of way. On another level, though, it’s almost amusingly ridiculous, suggesting that the way to finally be done with the war on terror is to put a bullet in every sad sack locked up at Gitmo and dump their bodies into the sea.
I imagine that’s not quite what Ray—the director of Shattered Glass and Breach, two of the best films about Washington, D.C., made in the last 12 years—was going for, but it’s not an unreasonable takeaway. Sometimes a metaphor can be a prison too, shackling creativity to an under-considered thought.