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One Minute to Nine (2007)
3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Powerful., 20 March 2008
Author: lorie helen from Austin, TX
A friend asked me to see this film at SXSW. I walked into the theater knowing nothing and she was right, the story is incredibly powerful. The way the story is told made me pay attention, and as the details of the Wendy's life came into focus I was shocked by the story. Following the film one member of the audience even mentioned that he had to go for a long walk. That about summed up my feelings. I wanted to feel bad for everything I had just seen, but I was left with some inkling of hope that things will be better. I have the utmost admiration for Wendy and total contempt at the deficiencies in our justice system. A great film about a very sad and common problem in today's society.
Excellent Doc on Tragic Case, 25 April 2008
Author: truecrimewriter from United States
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
Tommy Davis's brilliant documentary One Minute to Nine lays out the case of Wendy Maldonado, 35, a mother of four boys, who murdered her husband of nearly twenty years, Aaron, 36, on May 1, 2005.
One Minute's first minute wastes no time in setting up a sense of uneasiness that permeates throughout the film. Seemingly innocuous home video footage of young boys sledding in the snow, juxtaposed with an eerily dark ambient piano-based soundtrack set the mood for an unusual trip ahead. The capper is a split-second shot of a man, presumably the boys' father, who glares into the camera lens almost as if he is looking directly through the person shooting the video.
From there, the film shifts to a leisurely paced discussion with an attractive, yet tired looking, Wendy Maldonado. At first, the viewer is unaware of her significance. Her purpose is not immediately thrust into the viewers' laps. Instead, Davis allows us to get to know who this young, pretty, likable woman is and warm up to her instantly.
This is followed by several of her family members, including three of her four boys and her mother. The whole family seems very loving toward one another. However, an undercurrent of tension is faintly apparent. Eventually, it is revealed that Wendy has murdered her abusive husband, Aaron, and it is only a matter of days before she is to be sent off to prison for ten years. She and her family are getting their affairs in order and Wendy is able to reveal the horror of what happened behind the walls of their Grants Pass, Oregon home.
Aaron Maldonado apparently was a video hound. He loved to shoot footage of his young lovely young bride and their playful teen courtship. This was followed by a teenage marriage and a pregnancy. The couple gave birth to a girl who, unfortunately, passed away after only nine days. Despite this early tragedy, the couple forged onward and had four more children, all boys. Photos of a very pregnant Wendy, baring twins, revealed the couple to be happy and in love.
According to Wendy, however, Aaron began to change. As the boys grew up, he used to pick on them quite a bit. He also became sterner with Wendy and had developed a quick temper. He also started to seem to be losing it quite a bit. Aaron professed to his wife that he dreamed of becoming a serial killer, one on par with the Ed Geins and Charles Ings of the world. He wanted to capture his prey, seclude them in a basement and torture them for as "long as it took for them to die." He then proclaimed he wanted to skin their bodies and consume their flesh.
Despite these glaring warning signs, Wendy stuck around.
Aaron's teasing of the children began to escalate, especially in regard to their oldest son, Randy, whom he began to smack around. He started beating Wendy, too. He allegedly bruised her repeatedly and even knocked out several of her teeth with his fists.
Some of the most disturbing portions of One Minute to Nine are culled from the family video footage during this time frame. A few pops to the head of his kids begins the transformation. One shot of him teaching one of his little boys, probably no more than two or three years old, how to shoot a shotgun is devastating. Finally, Aaron's desecration of a dead baby deer, illustrated with a flying kick to the head of the dead animal, and then the latter supping of its blood from its eviscerated belly, are mortifying.
Again, despite the ever-escalating warning signs, Wendy Maldonado chose to stick by Aaron's side.
Throughout the first 2/3 of the film, Davis pulls a nice red herring in regard to the oldest son, Randy. References are made to him in the past tense, as if he may be dead, possibly at the hands of Aaron.
It is the reveal that Randy actually helped kill his father, however, where I lost a little bit of sympathy for Wendy Maldonado. I know the appropriate thing to say in regard to domestic abuse cases is that the abuser created an environment in which the abused feels he or she is unable to escape. Indeed, Wendy claimed that Aaron threatened her with death if she ever told the police about his misdeeds. He supposedly even threatened her that if she ever took off, he would go after her family members and kill them one by one until he found her.
For me personally, I have a very difficult time understanding how she would allow her son to participate in the brutal killing of his father, regardless of what he had done to her and the boys. I understand that there are serious problems with law enforcement in regard to domestic violence and that the authorities are not always reliable, as is evidenced in the movie, but I still have a hard time reconciling the fact that she would allow her son to participate in the murder.
That does not, however, detract from the brilliance of the film-making on display. It is, rather, a testament to Davis' skill that he can wring so many disparate emotions out of his viewers.
Indeed, by the end of the film, you have to ask yourself if justice has been properly served? Did her son deserve more than just six years for his part in the crime? Should Wendy be locked away for more than the 10 years she was sentenced to? Or, were they both wrongfully convicted? Should there be an expansion of the self-defense laws as posited by the judge who sympathized with her plight? These are but a few of the powerful questions raised by Tommy Davis' excellent documentary, One Minute to Nine. Thankfully, the film allows the viewer to make up his or her own mind.
2 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
A Compelling, but Oddly Incomplete film, 13 March 2008
Author: JustCuriosity from Austin, TX
One Minute to Nine had its North American Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. The film tells the heartbreaking story of Wendy Maldonado and how decades of domestic abuse finally led her to kill her abusive husband. The film was well-received by an audience deeply sympathetic to her predicament.
The film is beautifully edited. The use of the family's home videos to supplement the 5-day footage with some historical background is powerful. The story that they tell is emotionally devastating, but it feels like half a story that raises more questions that it answers. Much more could have been done if they had chosen to interview the lawyers, the law enforcement officials, the judge, and experts of domestic violence to build a larger context around Wendy's specific case.
In some ways, the inherent drama of the story of Wendy and her children is more compelling and disturbing than the film Tommy Davis has made. Davis set out to make a film about how a family copes with the prospect that a loved one is being sent to prison in a few days. They apparently, almost accidentally, stumbled on Wendy Maldonado and her case which raises all sorts of legal and moral questions about domestic violence. They succeeded in telling that limited story that they set out to tell, but film doesn't seem to go far nearly far enough in exploring the societal implications of this tragedy which ultimately seems more important than the relatively narrow project that they present to the audience.
By telling her story they open up many important political, social and cultural questions, which they chose not to systematically address. Their narrow focus allows them to focus on the brief window of time leading up to her incarceration and the family history that led up to it, but they choose not to explore the deeper questions of the failure of the system that led up to this tragedy.
Why didn't the police arrest her husband for assault and domestic abuse during the proceeding 2 decades of abuse? Couldn't she have left him and sought a restraining order? Why didn't her family and friends help her to get out of this situation? Where were the social service agencies? Why did she get such a long prison sentence? What sort of legal representation did she have that advised her to take the plea bargain offered her? Is there an effort to get her a pardon or clemency? Decades after the "Burning Bed" made this sort of occurrence a national shame, how often does this still happen in the US and how can it be stopped?
While it is always easy to criticize documentary film makers for the film that they didn't make, in this case, the story cries out for a deeper examination and what they have done feels like it has opened up a door, but failed to walk through it. The film is compelling and important for what it shows us; however, it also feels narrow and unsatisfactory, because there is so much more that we need to know to try to understand the broader social and political implications of why Wendy is sitting in prison cell today.
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