‘Free Chol Soo Lee’ ostensibly covers a wrongful conviction for murder and a fight for justice, but the film also delves much deeper, exposing multiple cultural fault lines and the all too human being at the center of the case
True, there is an incredible act of injustice at its center, and many trappings of the genre are present, here. A legal and policing system corrupted by, in this case, racism; a race against a death penalty clock; an exoneration; and details too extraordinary to be true, making them the best kind of nonfiction, as in the discovery of a connection between Lee and one of the white witnesses that offers a shockingly strips the state’s case of almost all credibility.
The grassroots campaign raging beyond those prison walls, nurturing a generation of lawyers and activists, matters just as much to this film as the stranger-than-fiction turns in Lee’s conviction and exoneration.
In a way, this is an image problem, a reminder of the gap between the idea of a man and the man himself. It’s a problem that was always already a part of this story; racist stereotypes enforce the same kind of gap, only, of course, more violently.
Compare this to Ha and Yi’s handling of J. Tony Serra, the famed, eccentric defense attorney on Lee’s legal team who was also the larger-than-life inspiration for’s ponytailed movie lawyer. We get enough of him to know that his personality alone is worth its own movie , but not enough for us to forget that he is but one part of a broader effort.
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