“If there’s any test that can be applied to movies,” said the late Pauline Kael, film critic of the New Yorker, “it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”
But virtue is precisely what a US judge is hoping one movie in particular will instil in a Missouri miscreant. David Berry Jr was convicted along with other members of his family in a poaching case about the killing of hundreds of deer. Handing down a 12-month custodial sentence, Judge Robert George didn’t throw the book at Berry so much as the DVD: he attached an unusual addendum stipulating that the inmate should watch Disney’s tear-jerking 1942 masterpiece Bambi on a monthly basis throughout his prison time.
Thoughts of the aversion therapy undergone by Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in A Clockwork Orange spring to mind, though presumably Berry won’t be strapped to a chair with his eyelids prised open. On the contrary, I visualise it more as a comic moment in a Coen brothers movie: hardened cons in the communal TV room getting rowdy at first when the baseball game is switched off in favour of Bambi, before quickly succumbing to its melancholy power. They’d be in bits by the 40-minute mark.
It’s true that the judge’s decision looks somewhat glib and ineffectual under the circumstances. Is a man who has been found responsible for slaughtering hundreds of deer for “the thrill of the kill” (in the words of Randy Doman of the Missouri Department of Conservation) likely to be swayed by the onscreen demise of a cartoon doe? It seems as far-fetched as prescribing a season of films to tempt a criminal back on to the straight and narrow.
As it happens, a discerning cinephile judge has at their disposal a whole sub-genre to deter the recidivist robber: that’s the heist-gone-wrong movie, as represented by Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs or Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. If Bambi is going to make a poacher think again, then any one of these might spur a stick-up artist to hang up the balaclava and sawn-off shooter for good.
But film fans may find the Bambi case pleasing for another reason. Whenever cinema is invoked in a legal context, it is usually as a corrupting influence: Child’s Play 3 and Natural Born Killers are among those movies on which copycat violence has been erroneously blamed. (A Clockwork Orange, too, was withdrawn from distribution by its director, Stanley Kubrick, for the same reason.) It can only be the case, though, that films at their best make us better people. Cinema, like all art forms, is an empathy machine: it expands our perspective and invites us to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – or hooves, in the case of Bambi. Exposure to the complete works of Jean Renoir or Satyajit Ray, Jonathan Demme or Kelly Reichardt, Aki Kaurismäki or Preston Sturges, can only improve a person’s aspect and outlook, and increase our levels of compassion.
There have been occasions when a film has even changed the tenor of public discourse. Liberal Hollywood is often accused of preaching to the converted, and Demme’s Aids drama Philadelphia, overflowing as it is with good intentions, would be an easy target for ridicule. But it really did alter people and politics. Demme, who died in 2016, said he wanted to “come up with a movie that would help push for a cure and save lives. We didn’t want to make a film that would appeal to an audience of people like us, who already had a predisposition for caring about people with Aids. We wanted to reach the people who couldn’t care less about people with Aids. That was our target audience.” When Tom Hanks won a best actor Oscar for his part in the picture, it brought the subject into the public conversation in a way that might not have happened so quickly or effectively without it.
Of course, the ultimate riposte to anyone who doubts that films can have a direct and positive social impact is Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home. Watched by 12 million people in 1966, it led directly to the formation of the homelessness charity Crisis a few months later. No documentation exists on the effect that the 1995 film Babe had on the diets of its young audience, but if it hasn’t turned a fair few people off meat over the years then this vegetarian will eat a steak.
• Ryan Gilbey is a film journalist
