The Wrong Man: How the Silence of Jesus Reverses our Judgment

In the 1956 film The Wrong Man, Manny Balestrero (played by Henry Fonda) is arrested in an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. With little explanation, he is charged with armed robbery and imprisoned. The central sequence of the film then follows Manny as he is led through the opaque, impersonal legal apparatus that will determine his fate. What is remarkable about the film is the lack of the now ubiquitous Hollywood prison brutality or high courtroom drama. Instead, the police are efficient and courteous, but utterly banal. The lawyers are neither corrupt nor overly righteous; they merely belong to a kind of cabal of priests and passive functionaries in the service of an omnipotent judicial system. 

In one of the film’s most powerful moments, Manny sits in the courtroom, his face fixed in a look of terrified bewilderment. As the lawyers engage in proceduralist banter (their voices deliberately muffled and indistinct) and the jury talks disinterestedly among themselves, Manny clutches a silver crucifix in his hands beneath the table and silently prays. The entire legal process appears to Manny as simultaneously all-powerful and completely impersonal. That’s the obscenity, the monstrosity of his ordeal: he is at the mercy of an insane system convinced of its own rectitude. No wonder, then, that it takes a miracle at the end of the film to save Manny from wrongful judgment. But the very fact that such a miracle is necessary for Manny to be found innocent, in turn, enacts a kind of reverse judgment on the deranged legality of the legal system itself.

Though it may well seem strange to invoke Hitchcock on Good Friday, I cannot help but recall The Wrong Man whenever I hear the trial narratives in the Gospels being read. Jesus is not portrayed as the victim of either excessive brutality or an overly malign conspiracy. Rather, he is passed (the more genteel term “delivered” or “handed over” is repeatedly used) from Judas to the Sanhedrin, and then to Pilate, and then to Herod, and then back to Pilate, and then to a mob – each of whom defers responsibility for Jesus’s execution to the next. John Milbank is thus surely correct to observe, “Even in his death, Jesus was still being handed back and forth, as if no one actually killed him, but he died from neglect.”

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