I know that something I’ve said already more than once in starting out about a film is that it wasn’t what I expected, and it’s happened enough that I should just expect them not to be like I expected. But Domestic Violence 2 is a real surprise. Where I thought we’d go, given the first Domestic Violence, would be court situations where the violent offender husbands would get the book thrown at them and they’d be tossed in jail for extremely long sentences. Given that the first film recounts one awful case after another that drove these women to get help escaping, the neat way to structure these two would be to match the crimes with the punishments. Even if the people involved in the second were entirely different, I still thought we’d get the matching comeuppances. The first film showed the women getting free from their abusers, and the second would be the abusers getting their just desserts. I guess that would have been too tidy, and Domestic Violence 2 doesn’t go that way at all, even though everything but its first ten minutes and its last three take place entirely in courtrooms. No other leaving the building, not anything in hallways or otherwise outside a courtroom, just case after case, mostly starting out as the setting of court dates in preliminary hearings or the termination of injunctions. Never a jury trial, never an actual case being tried. Story after story does come out, but not at all ones that match neatly with the horror tales of part one. It’s a complicated messy world, and Domestic Violence 2 only makes it messier.
The one sequence before heading into the courtroom starts out looking like more of the same - the cops called to the scene of a fight between a husband and wife. Instead of one more bloody wife and the monster who did it, now the wife has left some scratches on her husband, and it turns out she’s being arrested, because as the police explain, the law in Florida requires that if there’s evidence of domestic violence one of the parties will go to jail. As an officer tells the husband "with domestic violence, there's no guesswork in it anymore.” That’s easier said than done, both in this case and in the whole remainder of the movie. A whole lot of guesswork is involved, because the cases are often so ambiguous. That’s the art of this movie, forcing you to figure out time after time what’s going on. In that first case, differences and reversals are all over the place. As she’s being taken away, the husband attempts to offer to go to jail instead of her. She’s the one arrested because as a cop explains to the husband: “She kept hitting you and you didn’t hit her back.” But why she says they have one child and he says they have four is never explained, and when he talks to her as she’s about to be taken away, he says he’s going to get her out because she’s done the same for him in the past, very much counter to her story to the police that neither of them has ever been arrested. Our broadening view of domestic violence is not where it looked like part one was taking us, which was to a world of wife batterers who had to be brought to justice. Instead, from this one additional police decision of what to do at a scene, on into the courtrooms, we’re left with the impression of lots of couples fighting, and no one coming out so well as a result. It leaves you fairly shocked again at what people who must have been in love at some point now do to each other - the forms of threats, the stated reasons for anger, the varieties of violence, the many times really violent acts are forgiven.
The Spring, central focus of the first film, is only mentioned twice in this film, and both times it’s about sending a husband there for a domestic violence evaluation and some classes. I don’t think we saw any evaluations of men when we were in The Spring, and when the judge orders one of the wives to be evaluated there too, I couldn’t recall anyone the first time around who was there because a judge said she had to be there. The first mention of The Spring doesn’t come for over two hours, so any thought that we’d see the two institutions working together to make a dent in this problem certainly doesn’t seem indicated by that lack of clear linkage. They both may be working very well, just not in regular concert with each other. This film comes across as literally the court of last resort. It’s up to these judges actually to attempt to knock some sense into these people, usually to demand that they separate completely, even if they’re stupid enough to resist.
Domestic Violence 2, like its predecessor, bears resemblances to popular TV shows, but feels like the bracing corrective to what melodrama can do to real life. The big lesson, though, is how absolutely riveting observational cinema can be with a guiding intelligence like Wiseman’s. The two films together clock in at 356 minutes, just two minutes shy of Near Death’s 358, which might be deliberate so that Near Death can remain the longest film. I’m not trying to play a numbers game and I think I’m going to retire even mentioning length any further if I can help it, but I’m bringing it up here just to say that, like onlookers at accident scenes, you remain transfixed in these two movies from first minute to last. Even the repetitions and the similarities of some stories lead to a wonderment that these situations are so common. I kept thinking of “Law and Order” the television series (not Wiseman’s same named film which came 21 years earlier), which divided its time neatly in two between the crime and the punishment. I loved that show, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the dramas unfolding here. I’m sorry, but there’s still something about seeing real people that has a unique fascination. We don’t have to choose documentary over fiction - this is just to affirm that documentary doesn’t have to mean boring or undramatic or uninteresting - anything but.
The remarkable rigor of Domestic Violence 2 is that it mainly takes place in three courtrooms, and in each, it’s one case after another. That’s it, and it’s so straightforward as to be brilliant in execution. The first courtroom belongs to Judge Heinrich, and one of the reasons this film is so watchable is that judges can be real performers, establishing their personas and playing them to the hilt. All three of these judges have got their methods for handling these cases down pat, and we watch expert practitioners of their craft, as no-nonsense as those who stand before them are very much the opposite. Like the judges, I think we come to doubt large amounts of what they listen to, cross-checking their stories with the police reports and past histories in front of them. Judge Heinrich is a great opening act, conducting what is later called “video court”, as the defendants and just about everyone else are seen on TV monitors from other locations, presumably to keep the violent offenders away from their accusers. This leads to a very Wisemanesque interplay of television monitors, split screens, and people responding to screens that somehow suits these often surreal proceedings. This judge is mainly setting court dates and bail amounts, but like the other judges, he’s more than ready to speak plainly and deservedly harshly to these defendants. He doesn’t speak in terms of injunctions, it’s simply “no contact rules” he’s determined to enforce until the cases come to trial, and he’s aware that applies to both sides, memorably warning one husband and wife "If you have to be placed in isolation cells and cut off from the entire world, that is what I will do to you” if they are in the same place for any reason whatever. He’s also clearly seen too many cases of victims recanting, and he’s doing what he can to forcefully encourage that not to happen. One of his great warnings on that score to a woman he’s just given a trial date to is to tell her that if she changes her story and says instead that she “lied or exaggerated” that “she will go to jail here today on the spot for contempt of court. You will go to jail here on the spot for a false crime report, and you could be charged with a felony case of perjury where you could go to prison for up to five years." This guy just doesn’t mess around with those on either side.
The film is an excellent lesson too in learning by repetition, for us, if not for the couples we see. The lessons are along the lines of just don’t have contact with each other, if you have kids then have a third party handle the passing of them from one of you to the other, whatever you say in court better not contradict what was reported at the scene, if the same thing has happened more than once then recognize the pattern. Heinrich is never surprised by the stories he gets, of what was just an accident, was the result of supposedly temporary drinking or drugs, didn’t happen the way the other person says it did. What he believes is evidence of injuries, police reports, and previous arrest records. Maybe because he’s the first step in this judicial process and isn’t resolving any cases or meting out sentences, he doesn’t have to make knotty choices, but I found it refreshing to see his dispassionate and direct manner of dealing with the people on his video screens. This isn’t the place to hear about personal feelings or changes of heart. It’s one after another of couples in battle, and Heinrich is taking no prisoners, quite admirably. It’s bureaucratic efficiency, but here it looks like the right way to handle things. Even when he lets someone out until their trial, the warnings are stern. "Don't do anything wrong, this matter is far from being over. It's just beginning." And when the truly horrible comes up, he’s not taking any chances. In a sexual battery case, he wants to be sure the record is clear whether the five year old child in the case has made the charge or if it’s a claim by the mother. “If he did that to his five-year-old kid, he's not going anywhere” meaning he stays in jail from now to the trial. I’m quoting too much, but that’s how this film is - remarkable situations in rapid succession. When you get the judge saying "Why in God's name would you want someone out of jail who you have on probation for two prior acts of violence against you and on this case he allegedly dropped you on your head?" the answer we hear is still shocking: "Under normal circumstances, he's a very gentle man." A TV show would never think that believable. Here it’s all too true. And Heinrich gets a great Wiseman End of Scene line, after a guy who’s previously been in jail for murder and is now back for domestic violence asks to make a statement after his bail request has been denied. “Absolutely 100% no way in this world” is his immediate reply, and for effect he repeats this. Our time with Judge Heinrich comes to about forty-five minutes, and it must have been really difficult for Wiseman to condense him that much. I really hated to see us leave his courtroom. I would have easily listened to hours more. Sorry, I have to mention this other amazing moment of his too, in a cross-complaint case where it comes out that the man has had five other battery convictions against her from previous times, as well as burglary and drug convictions, before this time his wife chased after him in her car. The judge’s reaction: "Sounds like she probably should have run him over."
I won’t go this berserk with the second judge, and the shift at this point is that she’s actually hearing cases, so Wiseman does have a careful progression here. She’s Judge Ober, and she’s still faintly hopeful that people can listen to reason, even if she has lots of demonstrations before her of why this isn’t likely to happen. In her big piece of the film, we more or less return to that Wiseman situation of stories getting more complex, or here at least more convoluted, as we go along. The Judge is quite opinionated, and where Heinrich was prone to threatening jail, she’s mainly after just keeping these couples away from each other and expressing strong disapproval of their actions. With her too, there is not a strict sense of women as victims and males as aggressors. At least with this judge, she’s ready to blame them both. In her first case, she offers this: “I don't understand how you can live like this and I don't understand how you can raise a child in this kind of atmosphere. Think this child has a chance growing up in this environment? No way." And rejecting the idea of a reconciliation, she’s equally adamant: "you two can't be together regardless of how you feel about each other." Her cases come one after the other just like before, although as I said, of greater length, and as these tales of hostility and violence get laid out before her, she musters the occasional “Oh God” as the stories get worse and worse. We really do need to see these spin out of control to appreciate the messiness judges must contend with and how deep the problems of domestic violence go. If the stories were condensed any further, the judge’s frustrations and her firmness in insisting couples must not come back together wouldn’t feel earned. She ends the last case of hers we see with a summary version of her repeated message, making certain it’s as clear as can be: ”No contact, no phone, no writing, no nothing. You two cannot see each other at all."
Judge Three, whose name is Palomino, deals with injunctions and whether it’s time to end them or keep them going. If the person who initiated the injunction isn’t present, it gets dismissed, but only after the judge tries to be certain that there has been no attempt to instill “fear or coercement” that might have led to the absence. We hear him ask the subjects of the injunctions about this over and over, and it took awhile for it to sink in to me that he’s surprisingly ready just to take the word of these (almost all) guys that they had nothing to do with their spouses not showing up. It may be that he knows how common recanting is, and that if the guys are committing perjury before him, he knows how to handle it. When both parties are there, while they might want to drop the injunction, he’s ready to do what he thinks his right. When he hears of a bunch of threats and various kinds of violence in one case, even though the woman wants now to drop it, Judge Palomino, looking very unhappy, asks “What do you want me to do. . . . You were in deathly fear. . . . What am I, a potted plant?” He refuses to dismiss the injunction and says they are going to stay away from each other, and if they violate that “I’m going to put both of you in jail.” A number of these cases suggest there is more than enough questionable behavior to go around. Like I said, it’s not just simple cases of abusers and victims. All three judges combine a determination to prevent further violence whatever way they know how,
Domestic Violence 2 has an odd little three-minute coda, especially given our staying in the three successive courtrooms for most of the movie. If we followed the approach of the first film, we might head out with the police on one final domestic violence call, to underscore the unsettling nature of what we’ve been viewing. Instead, it’s one of those wordless montages that look like the endings of other Wiseman films, where we go outside the place we’ve been restricted to long enough to provide some symmetry with the beginning. Here, it looks like that for a bit, as we see the outside of the courthouse and then some local fast food spots and shopping malls. But then there’s a strange minute, beginning with a shot of a cemetery and its grave markers, not unlike how Belfast, Maine ended, except there it was the final shot. After the cemetery, we see a series of shots, maybe twenty, of single-family homes at various income levels. I think the idea is that domestic violence is a possible problem in any of them, and we can’t think of families in the same way once we’ve been through these two films. I would have to agree. We do get a few final shots of the Tampa skyline, edited to have the city recede into the distance, but the impact of seeing that cemetery and the exteriors of those houses is strong, even though they’re dropped into an otherwise typical ending. Life is short and we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. The look these two films provide is unsettling and unexpected, to say the least. For two more Wisemans that I don’t think get much attention, this is powerful stuff.