The Guilty and Understanding Why Joe Did What He Did

| October 4, 2021 |

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Jake Gyllenhaal in The Guilty — *Photo: Netflix*

This commodity contains major spoilers for The Guilty. Yous tin can read our spoiler-complimentary review here.

In Antoine Fuqua'due south new Netflix film, The Guilty , Jake Gyllenhaal stars every bit Joe Baylor, a police officer forced to work in a Los Angeles Emergency Call Center due to an ongoing investigation into misconduct that occurred while Baylor was on the job. The film gives us scarce details about what went down, with Joe's ex-partner Rick and his one-time sergeant alluding to a court engagement, as well as a reporter from the Los Angeles Times repeatedly calling Joe for annotate, merely no one spells out exactly what Joe did to get the punishment of working the phones.

Information technology's only in The Guilty 's final moments that nosotros get some clarity on the situation, though the details are still kept vague. Later Joe'due south persistence pays off and he discovers that his mystery caller Emily is not the victim of a kidnapping, only a mentally unstable adult female who physically harmed her infant son, he badly tries to convince Emily not to hurt herself. To try to chronicle to the feelings that Emily is having, he reveals his own history of violence. Joe reveals that he shot a 19-year-old man while on duty.

"I wanted to punish him because I was angry. He hurt someone," Joe tells Emily.

Joe ends the film by calling back the reporter and we learn that Joe pleads guilty to manslaughter, despite other conversations indicating that he would fight to be acquitted at his trial. Looking at how Joe is presented in the picture, it's non a stretch to imagine this graphic symbol making such a ghastly and bad determination, so trying to justify it to himself. We see how Joe reacts to stressful situations: He'southward demanding and impulsive, and he yells and snaps at colleagues that are just trying to assist him.

Another attribute that seems damning is the mode that Joe judges the flick'southward early 911 callers, every bit if they are non worthy of help since they figuratively made their beds themselves. Adding to that, he doesn't hesitate to break the police force by having Rick break into Emily's ex-husband's apartment if it ways he can solve a case. We can also see that he's hyper-motivated to practise good things, likely as a production of his current predicament, but it's easy to speculate that Joe was appalled by some violent behavior which he believed this nineteen-year-sometime committed (whether he did or non), and then lashed out to an extreme to correct the situation.

Recall Joe'south inaccurate snap judgment of Emily's ex-married man, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard): "What practise you want me to say, that you lot're a victim? You're non a victim, Emily is a victim, Olivier is a victim, Abby is a victim. You're not a victim, y'all should be fucking executed!"

Could Joe have performed a real-life execution in a moment of self-righteous fury, fifty-fifty about a 19-year-onetime kid? It seems painfully likely.

The Guilty raises the question of whether it is trying to defend or explain abroad police brutality past putting a sympathetic face up to the inhumane behavior. Gyllenhaal see's Baylor'southward actions as how an officeholder would ideally accept responsibility if their poor judgement resulted in the loss of a life.

In an interview with Borderline , Gyllenhaal describes the end of the motion picture equally ""fantasy, what we hope and what we wish for."

He added, "What is non happening is because of a broken system. When [managing director Antoine Fuqua] and I offset spoke about the moving picture, it was about mental wellness and about systemic problems that he felt were important. We both dear a hugely entertaining movie on the surface, but nosotros need anchors, and nosotros need things to connect to. This picture show offered it to both of us."

While the actor would clarify that the prominent recent examples of police brutality, such as the murder of George Floyd, created "a different sort of chat" in the film, he added "bluntly, it was a chat that I felt to exist extraordinarily important. I idea, '[Can nosotros] still make this flick, given the environment, the sociopolitical issues that were going on? It became even more important for me to desire to try and brand information technology.'"

While at the end of the film it's articulate that the title is meant to reverberate Joe Baylor, the motion picture still walks a strange line between condemning Joe and celebrating his power to know that he was wrong in his actions. Information technology feels more a fleck uncomfortable trying to sympathize with a killer cop. It will exist interesting to run across how audiences respond to the film as it continues to attract new viewers on Netflix.