AmateurMovieReviews.com

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a film loosely based on the true story of the death of a German girl named Anneliese Michel who died in 1976. I usually enjoy movies that are based on true stories, so I was really looking forward to seeing this film. Plus, Laura Linney was in this, and I've grown rather fond of her work recently.

In this film, Emily Rose (played by Jennifer Carpenter) is a young woman excited about the prospect of going off to college on a full scholarship. Her mother and father are devout Catholics and they worry about Emily being all alone, but they allow her to go because it's her dream.

While at school, strange things start to happen to Emily. She suffers from sudden muscular contractions, fits, and hallucinations. She's not sure what's going on, so she reaches out for help. Medical doctors feel that she could be suffering from epilepsy and perhaps some psychosis, so they prescribe various drugs for her. However, those drugs are ineffective, and that's when Emily and the family priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) speculate that Emily might be possessed by demons. Father Moore then sets up an exorcism, but it goes horribly wrong and Emily ends up dying.

Father Moore is arrested and put on trial for negligent homicide. At first he's assigned a public defender, but the archdiocese doesn't want to risk the bad publicity that would come along with a conviction, so Father Moore gets a high-powered attorney named Erin Bruner (Linney). Bruner is opposed in court by prosecutor Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), a man of faith who nevertheless thinks that Father Moore's attempted exorcism directly led to Emily's death.

The main focus of the film is on Father Moore's trial, so the movie never encroaches on the territory covered by 1973's The Exorcist. In a way this was a good move by the director (Scott Derrickson) because it would be a very tall order for any film to compete with The Exorcist on the same battlefield. But at the same time, the courtroom scenes were a bit boring and made the action seem much more distant.

Indeed, everything having to do with Emily is told in disjointed flashbacks. Viewers are only able to piece together her story a bit at a time, which made it difficult to develop any real sympathy for the character or any real interest in her plight. This was a strange situation because it seemed as though the filmmakers wanted Emily to be the focal point of the movie. I certainly wouldn't consider Erin Bruner or Father Moore the main characters, so that leaves Emily.

I thought the movie did a good job of presenting a balanced view of Emily's death in the courtroom scenes. There was compelling evidence for both the prosecution and the defense as to the cause of Emily's death, and it was interesting as a viewer to hear these arguments. I kept wondering how I would have voted had I been on the jury, and I couldn't really tell; however, I was leaning towards the same verdict that the jury eventually arrived at, so that was good.

I thought Laura Linney and Campbell Scott were both terrific in their roles. As I mentioned above, Linney has become one of my favorite actresses recently and she always seems to do outstanding work. I haven't seen Campbell Scott in much of anything since 1991's Dying Young, so I barely recognized him here, but he provided a nice counterpart to Linney's character.

On the whole, however, I didn't think that The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a very strong movie. I sat down to watch it expecting one kind of film, but got a completely different one, one that wasn't very effective in my opinion. In the movie, Father Moore repeatedly says that he wants "to tell Emily's story," but I don't think he succeeded in that. Instead of coming away with a better understanding of what Emily went through or of what might have contributed to her demise, she remains a somewhat shadowy figure whose death is still shrouded in mystery. If that's what happened with Anneliese Michel, then I can't fault the filmmakers; but I still wish this story would have been a bit more concrete.