Errol Morris has a knack for building documentaries around unique personalities, from Gates of Heaven, to Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, to Mr. Death to The Fog of War, and now Tabloid. His latest is perhaps the juiciest but not necessarily the most effective. The story revolves around Joyce McKinney, a Southern ex-beauty queen, who gained a sordid notoriety in Britain in 1977. As she tells it, Kirk Anderson, the man she loved and had engaged to marry, was abducted by a Mormon cult. So she flew to England to help him escape and have a child with him.
The film relies mostly on interviews with McKinney, who is a charming, vivid storyteller with a streak of dark humor, but of course, that is just her version of the events. Once he returned to his mission and the press got their hands on the story they included the important details of how she took him to a cottage in the country and chained him to the bed so she could recondition him...with her body. He became known as the “Manacled Mormon,” and she went on trial for rape but was soon hanging out in clubs with rock stars. Don’t worry, it just so happens I haven’t spoiled all of the weird stuff yet.
For me the fascinating thing about documentaries, other than the real-life stories being told, is dissecting the ways that they are told, the methods used by directors to frame the happenings and engage the audience. This interest holds for narrative film as well, but with documentaries there is an especially sensitive line because of the “ideal” notion of a dispassionate eye recording the subject. Too often the unmistakable influence of the director behind the camera and in the editing room amounts to a clearly defined agenda, blurring the line between documentary and propaganda. Any documentary that upholds this ideal gets bonus points from me (Last year’s Restrepo is a solid recent example.)
I bring up this digression because Tabloid is very clearly a film about manipulations, where we are being told different sides of the story and it is nearly impossible to know exactly where the truth lies. Joyce certainly feels that Kirk was being manipulated by the Mormons. Other interviews substantiate the idea that she was manipulating him and the other people surrounding her, and there is a strong thread about the manipulations of information by both the press and the court system. Ultimately, Tabloid is the final manipulation of the story. Morris adds in some flashy collages of press clippings, photos, maps and home movies, deftly keeping things visually interesting and the momentum of the film moving at an amusing pace.
Unfortunately, there is an empty space in that there is no real entity to defend the side of Kirk Anderson and the Mormon church. The lone voice that comes close is is from a “reformed” Mormon who definitely has an axe to grind, making sure to ridicule Mormon theology, specifically its rules about sex and marriage, and highlighting the idea that abstinence is a critical sacrifice one must make so that when the world ends you can get your own planet. This imbalance leaves Tabloid wallowing in the realm of its subject matter, tickling with sensationalization, but wanting for substance.
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