Review of the mini-series "Lockerbie: In Search of the Truth": A Life Long Investigation
Colin Firth as a grieving father challenges the British government.
A mini-series is an ideal format for telling the story of horrific events: it allows you to feel the tragedy, but not drown in the details. A few years ago, this hypothesis was proven by Chernobyl, which immersed thousands of observers in the 1986 disaster. In the same decade, the Lockerbie curse began: on 21 December 1988, a Boeing 747 exploded over the Scottish city, killing 270 people. However, there is a significant difference between the two mentioned incidents: while the perpetrators of the Chernobyl accident have been found, the cause of the plane crash is still shrouded in mystery.
The first episode, as befits the discourse of grief, is the heaviest: doctor Jim Swire (Colin Firth) and his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack) see off their daughter Flora (Rosanna Adams), a 23-year-old medical student, on the ill-fated flight. The clamour of the send-off is replaced by rumblings in the sky over Lockerbie - as thunder usually sounds, just as the locals thought it would, before the plane's fuselage, engulfed in flames, collapses on the town. The only thing the Swire family has left of their daughter is a strand of dark hair cut off when the body was identified. Jim obsessively tries to get to the truth, and his struggle becomes the main nerve of the narrative.
Why did the family of the grieving doctor become the centre of the series? The answer is simple: Swire is not a character invented for the sake of drama, but a man who defied the state and wrote a memoir about his struggles with the system. As is often the case, the fighter for justice becomes the voice of the people - including all the families who lost loved ones in the Lockerbie tragedy. But soon enough Swire crosses the boundaries of what even the deeply grieving are allowed to do: he sneaks a bomb dummy into the airport to prove the worthlessness of the British security services, makes loud statements on live TV, which may not coincide with the opinions of other victims. To fit all of Jim's investigation into five episodes is not an easy task. On the screen now and again we are prompted to the coming year, while Swire revisits the same reports again and again - archive footage from the crash site accompanies each episode.
‘Lockerbie’ is filled with conflicts, and the main one is the struggle with a system that is not ready to co-operate. Already in the second series, the doctor begins to lose and all the rest: Jane is tired of constant visits from journalists and intrusive phone calls, while Jim himself chooses to devote his life to the dead, rather than to those who remained close by. At first, the viewer watches Swire's righteous anger with a touch of pride, but very soon the feeling is replaced by regret: when other families of the victims turn their backs on the doctor, the state falsifies evidence, and Jim himself begins to confuse the evidence, victory seems more and more elusive and unattainable.
An additional obstacle while watching is the intricacy of the investigation itself. The story is rife with political intrigue, which we learn about from the words of a man who is investigating for his own personal interests. When Jim's point of view changes once again, viewers are left to scrawl the clues on the wall and tie them together with red thread. Initially Swire was convinced that Iran must be responsible for the attack - the doctor chided the US for not wanting to recognise this version because the states wanted to avoid diplomatic complications. During the investigation, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, even the CIA were blamed, but in the end Libya became the scapegoat. Abdelbaset Ali Mahmed Al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), a citizen of the country, was found guilty of organising the attack. Swire, who initially agreed with the court's decision, would soon call Al-Megrahi ‘the 271st victim of the Lockerbie disaster’ and devote himself to his acquittal.
When even Jim is no longer sure which side to take, and his last allies - the journalists who have clung to the doctor as a symbol of the fight against the system - can no longer support him, the viewer is left to follow his emotions. But they are so intense here that they make you seasick: by the middle of the series, the repetitive dramatic soundtrack accompanying the long shots seems superfluous. The fierce struggle suddenly begins to resemble a soap opera, with the protagonist not raising his hands to the sky in a plea for help. And it is in this miscalculation of the director Otto Bathurst that the main problem of ‘Lockerbie’ lies: the viewer should be thinking about who will be punished, but instead bets on when Jane will file for divorce. And this, of course, is in no way the fault of the national hero Swire, but the decision of the creators who risked evoking pity rather than anger in the audience. The loneliness of the doctor is particularly emphasised in almost all scenes of the trial or journalistic visits: Ashley Rowe's camera deliberately makes Jim stand out.
‘Lockerbie’ is a lot like the recent “Presumption of Innocence” with Jake Gyllenhaal: both projects start out as detectives, but descend into a walk of personal torment, and the letter of the law is no longer so important. But the closer ‘Lockerbie’ gets to the finale, the more it feels like the story is being cut off halfway through. A couple more episodes could have gone deeper into how the British government covered its tracks and built a convenient version of events. This understatement paradoxically becomes the main message of the series: even truth-tellers who devote their lives to the pursuit of truth remain hostage to political games. Unlike Swire, who has come to terms with his loss, we, the audience, are still hungry for justice. And we are left with a bitter thought: if even a grieving father is lost in his search for justice, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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