Secret in their Eyes (2015)

“Passion always wins, right?” Uh, no. The point of Secret in their Eyes is rather the mortal cost of passions irrationally pursued.

The plot’s trigger is a young loser’s sudden passion for a blonde beauty that leads to his raping and killing her. It erupts again when he’s taunted by the beautiful lawyer Claire (Nicole Kidman). The killer is freed because he’s a snitch serving the police as an insider in a suspicious mosque. The passionate fear after 9/11 leads to the cops’ suspension of the law, sense and responsibility. 

The second layer of misspent passion is the two characters’ determination to correct that injustice. Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) quits the force to work in civilian security — protecting the hapless Mets —  but spends 13 years of evenings checking through files of criminal faces to find that killer. 

The murdered girl’s detective mother Jess (Julia Roberts) seems to share that determination to find the killer. But we ultimately learn she already has him. She has kept him in a shed for those 13 years, preferring thus to give him a life sentence rather than the release of execution. But as Ray points out, she has been serving that life sentence with him, as his restricted jailer.  

Ray’s colleague Bumpy still has the limp caused by his chase of the killer. “What limp?” he asks, wielding his cane, in a comic parallel to Jess and Ray crippling themselves by their obsession.

Ray is paralyzed by another passion, his unexpressed love for his former colleague, now DA, Claire. He left his “great” wife “Because she wasn’t you.” Now, 13 years later, Claire’s husband Ellis reveals he has always known she loved Ray not him. Her “We blew it” refers to the unrealized love between Claire and Ray, as well as their case against the killer.

So some passions lose because they’re not followed up, as Ray failed to ask out Claire because she was engaged. “We understand each other” is her description of her marriage, a pale consolation for a failed ardor. As Ray is played by the black Ejiofor his color provides another reason for his failure to have approached her. Her boss warns the community college grad against presuming to the Harvard whiz, but the racial divide was another unspoken barrier between them. 

But the main losers from passion are the obsessives who can’t let go and can’t modulate their driving forces. Claire rises through the ranks because of her determination. She’s always in control, careful to avoid excess. We see that when she exposes the killer by seeming to release him. Jess and Ray have the discipline of control and the determination to find justice — noble imperatives both — but step over the line into obsession, into the irrationality that diminishes their lives.

The title comes from the source Argentinian film. The opening shot establishes eyes digging for a secret in files and files of mug shots. Ray’s secret is his search, Jess’s her successful vengeance and Claire’s her drive to power. People may advance a very firm image but their essential secret lies in their eyes. And lies and lies and lies.
     All this psychodrama plays against a specific political context. The early scenes occur in the wake of 9/11, when America was driven by fears of Muslim terrorists and the rumour of sleeper cells about to erupt. The later are now, when our remains full of fear. The passion to fight that threat at whatever cost, to the point of destroying the values we are supposedly defending, is the national parallel to the personal passions exposed here as paralyzing and destructive. Mania in pursuit of our values is still mania. As the police boss Morales (an ironic name if there ever was one) and bad cop Siefert betray their office and justice, they embody the nation’s temptation to compromise its essential values for the putative purpose of defending them. Winning that way is really losing.