In the documentary by Susan Morgan Cooper, a father is on trial after his baby dies in the back seat of a hot car.
On the morning of June 18, 2014, Justin Ross Harris and his wife, Leanna, were the adoring parents of a 22-month-old son, Cooper. By the end of the day, their child was dead. Harris forgot to drop off his son at day care, and instead drove to work, leaving Cooper in the back seat, where the child died in the Georgia heat.
This year, 23 children have died in hot cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The documentary “Fatal Distraction” uses the tragic example of the Harris family to demonstrate this phenomenon. By following Harris’s murder trial in 2016, it shows the worst case scenario of what can happen when a child is left unattended.
The director Susan Morgan Cooper (“To the Moon and Back”; “An Unlikely Weapon”) takes the title of her film from a 2009 article written by Gene Weingarten, who appears in the documentary, along with a number of experts who have studied the issue of hot car deaths. In talking head interviews that unfortunately establish the film’s rote, even indifferent visual style, specialists offer dispassionate explanations for how parents can forget their children.
More powerful sequences involve statements from experts of a different kind — the agonized parents of children who died in the back seat. Cooper’s mother, Leanna, is interviewed for the movie, and her recollections of her son’s death and her ex-husband’s trial are among the movie’s most damning testimonies against the common practice of criminalizing caregivers who leave their children behind.
If the film is at times unimaginative as a work of art, it succeeds as a humane resource for understanding an unthinkable scenario.
Fatal Distraction
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
