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At first, I bundled these three films together under a thin umbrella of stories of crime and criminals, but the good news is that there is something deeper here in that they’re all projects that actually share a much richer commonality: Brave new ways to tell stories of violence. One is told almost entirely in body-cam footage; one is told largely through FaceTime conversations; one is a deconstruction of the entire genre of true crime that has proliferated into an industry. They’re all good-to-excellent, films that will make waves when they descend from the mountains of Park City.
I don’t think there was a documentary in the Sundance program this year more buzzed than Geeta Gandbhir’s excellent “The Perfect Neighbor,” a film that ends up a macro conversation about Stand Your Ground laws and systemic racism on a street in Florida while also being a micro story of the loss of a friend and mother. It is a deeply moving piece of filmmaking that consists almost entirely of body-cam footage of the cops responding to disturbances on an ordinary Florida street where an unordinary woman keeps calling them about the kids playing in her neighborhood. It is a film made so much more powerful by its lack of cinematic flourishes. Another filmmaker would have turned this story into Netflix true crime fare (more on that process later in this dispatch), but Gandbhir smartly understands that the footage speaks for itself, chronicling a pending tragedy like a slow-motion car crash. It is an infuriating story of a woman who considers herself above those around her. Gandbhir doesn’t have to comment on how much this story was formed by racism and privilege—the events speak for themselves.
“The Perfect Neighbor” has no talking heads. It is mostly body-cam footage with some inevitable interrogation room footage mixed in with some tragic news broadcast material too. The formal choice to never sit anyone down for a “traditional” interview is daring and rewarding. It makes us witnesses to an inevitable tragedy, watching as the pieces fall in place for what was essentially an execution. It’s the story of a woman well-known as the “Karen” of her neighborhood, someone who called the cops on children playing “loudly” in the streets multiple times, arguing that she had a right to quiet in the middle of the day that simply doesn’t exist. She’s an infuriating human being, one that could politely be excused by obvious mental illness if she didn’t also seem calculating in her awfulness.
One day, said Karen felt intimated by a neighboring mother who was tired of her calling her children the r-word and the n-word and she fired through her door. One of the most harrowing chapters I’ve ever seen in a documentary captures the aftermath of this event as children learn their mother has been executed. It’s hard to watch, but it’s also important to see.
Another act of witnessing takes place in Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s disturbing “The Alabama Solution,” a film that captures the brutal conditions behind bars in the deeply corrupt Alabama prison system through the footage captured by the people within it. In our increasingly echo-chambered world, “The Alabama Solution” will likely play to people who already know about the corruption, brutality, and slave labor that feed our prison system, but it’s still important to see the horrors that unfold in this country that so many consider free. It’s not free for everyone.
The story Jarecki told at the premiere was that he was invited to witness and film a church event at an Alabama prison, surprised that he was allowed to bring his cameras to the occasion. When there, we can see inmates approaching the filmmaking team with stories to tell. You think it’s hot in the yard? Imagine what it’s like at over 100 degrees in the dorms. And our food isn’t like this stuff at all. A byproduct of there being twice as many inmates as designed and a third as much staff is that a lot of inmates have illegal phones, which they use to contact Jarecki, Kaufman, and their team. The film largely consists of recorded phone conversations with people behind bars—again, a formally daring choice that allows a window into this world that a traditional documentary wouldn’t have presented.
Anyone tuned into stories about prison conditions in the United States, especially the South, will be depressingly unsurprised by what they see in “The Alabama Solution,” but the depths of the horror might be unknown for some. Watching smartphone footage of men OD-ing in horrific conditions or hearing stories of guard brutality can be tough to watch for two hours. Jarecki and Kaufman wisely provide a little release for the horrific footage by focusing on a representative case, that of a man beaten to death by guards. A photo of his corpse will stick with me forever, and not just because I realized that his mother was sitting two rows in front of me. I was close enough to her to feel her pain, but I didn’t have to have that much proximity to know that this is a story that should be told.
One of my major concerns about the Trump administration is that he will flood the zone with so much nonsense that the issues we should reasonably care about in the 2020s like climate change and gun violence will fall down the list of priorities. I think that’s intentional. In this climate of non-stop chaos, how will we ever have the time or energy to devote to prison reform? The people like that still-grieving mother in Park City deserve it.
Finally, there’s Charlie Shackleton’s remarkably smart “Zodiac Killer Project,” a documentary in the NEXT program instead of the documentary one for a very good reason. This isn’t a true crime documentary as much as a dissection of the entire genre. As someone who has covered true crime docuseries for years, and watches even more than I write about, Shackleton’s project hit home in so many ways. It’s a smart breakdown of how these series function, a reminder of their strengths and weaknesses that isn’t just another Zodiac series as much as a dissection of how these series work. It’s like pulling back the curtain on the true crime Wizard of Oz. You won’t quite look at another one the same way.
Shackleton set out to direct another disposable streaming docuseries about the Zodiac Killer. Readers should know that I believe I have seen them ALL, not only for review but because I’m actually a big true crime junkie, someone who sees through a lot of the tricks of this genre but enjoys it nonetheless. Shackleton uses a lot of footage from other shows in his film, and I can attest that I had watched every episode of every single one (almost shockingly so). Shackleton’s offering to the Zodiac gods was to be an adaptation of the book by Lyndon Lafferty, who believed he solved the case long before David Fincher or even Robert Graysmith got their hands on it. When Lafferty rescinded the rights at the last minute, Shackleton pivoted to make a movie that’s more about the entire true crime genre, and, honestly, the better for it.
“Zodiac Killer Project” consists almost entirely of Shackleton talking about the series he would have made. Shots of average parking lots and intersections are cut through with Shackleton not only discussing the case but how the true crime genre presents this kind of material. He brilliantly cuts his mundane footage with images from hit docuseries like “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx,” revealing the tricks of the trade as much as focusing on the well-known case itself. Do you know what a “Bactor” is? You will now. And he holds nothing back, taking aim at the ridiculous tonal shift from the first to second season of “Making a Murderer,” the final revelation of “The Jinx,” and more. He’s here not to opine on who the Zodiac Killer might have been, but how we tell this kind of story. It’s a brave, fascinating piece of filmmaking, one that asks viewers to question not just the mysteries of true crime storytelling but how they’re being told.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/ysQI9bl
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