“The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest”

The story of Mark DeFriest is a truth stranger than fiction. In 1980, DeFriest was sentenced to four years in prison for minor theft at the age of 20, but his fight-or-flight instincts kicked in and he fled from jail. Recaptured only a day later, DeFriest’s mental capacity was deemed unfit for prison. But after mounting a series of increasingly astounding escapes from a mental institution (and earning him the nickname “the Houdini of Florida”), a forensic psychologist testified that DeFriest was faking mental instability, which then led to DeFriest’s re-incarceration. Now, 30 years later, the same doctor has returned to undo what he now believes was a wrongful diagnosis—one that led to DeFriest suffering years of psychologically damaging solitary confinement and brutality.

DeFriest’s story is inherently fascinating and heartbreaking. The beguiling narrative will hook fans of true crime and social justice alone. But what hinders The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest from rising to the level of its captivating source material is Gabriel London’s direction. Culled from archival photographs and new interview footage with DeFriest and the major players in his case, London has clearly been influenced by Errol Morris’ style of investigation but without full understanding why Morris makes the choices that he does. London’s stylistic flourishes are superficial rather than illuminating—where Morris might linger on an interview subject to mine their body language for ulterior meaning, London cuts to multiple angles every few seconds. Such a technique is better utilized in other genres, but for the subject at hand it comes off as a little too slick and impatient.

Even worse, though, is the use of animated recreations. It is a cheap-looking gimmick, possessing a design aesthetic as amateurish as a Flash-animated graphic novel. The purpose of depicting DeFriest’s stories of escape as animated sequences are meant put the audience in his mentally compromised mindset, but such dime-store pathology misrepresents the tragedy of DeFriest’s circumstances. The emotional impact of the events as described are placed at an inappropriately glib remove—the most deplorable being the illustrated portrait of a prison gang rape.

The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest clearly has ambitions to be a galvanizing and microcosmic look at the prison industrial complex, using DeFriest’s case as but one tragic example among thousands. But the tone struck by London oscillates uncomfortably between awe (of DeFriest as a sort of comic book antihero) and compassion, further obfuscating the message rather than illuminating the compelling content.

2 stars out of 4