Tabloid (Friday, July 15, 2011) (55)

When Randall Adams died the New York Times ran a rather lengthy and in-depth obituary for him, albeit more than six months late. He had been wrongly convicted of killing a Dallas police officer in 1976 and had served 12 years in prison for the crime. It was only after filmmaker Errol Morris dug into the story and turned up mitigating evidence during the making of his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line that Adams got a new trial and released.

The Thin Blue Line is an *Important* film, not only for what it did for Adams but for what it did for the documentary format. Morris used a brilliant score by Philip Glass, wonderful reenactments that showed how moments described in testimony and witnesses' points of view are frequently hard to navigate and sometimes difficult to remember. He re-invented the interview documentary, showing that people sitting in chairs under artistic lighting can be interesting to watch. Most importantly, the film is much bigger than Adams or any of the people in the story. It becomes a story about humanity, the human condition, the fickleness of justice and the concept and understanding of memory.

Morris has had a brilliant career since then and several of his films aside from Blue Line (Vernon, Florida, A Brief History of Time, Mr. Death, The Fog of War) rank among my favorite films of all time. They all transcend their small, slice-of-life stories and show us a mirror into our souls as human beings. Morris latest film, Tabloid, though generally well made, is not particularly deep and delves into a subject that's simply not important enough for the filmmaker's effort. It is an decent film, but not brilliant and leaves us wanting a lot more in terms of interest or creativity.

The story begins simply enough. Joyce McKinney was a beauty queen who feel in love with a Mormon man named Kirk Anderson. As she was not Mormon, and neither particularly religious nor chaste, their relationship was immediately forbidden and he was sent on his mission as soon as possible. Not understanding the ins and outs of the religion, she thought he had been kidnapped by a cult, and raised funds to go rescue him in England.

When she got there (with a small posse of associates, most of whom were in love with her), she took him to a small inn on the coast and kept him tied up in bed for three days, while she forced him to have sex with her. He was declared missing by his church and McKinney's group was hunted down. After she was arrested, she became an immediate star through the work of two rival tabloid papers, the Daily Sun and the Daily Mirror, who were in the middle of a small war.

Each paper went to great lengths to dig up dirt on McKinney, and each got different information, which led to two very different portrayals of her on their pages. She was either a whore and a slut who posed for dirty S&M pictures to make money, or a sweet woman who was just heartbroken and was desperately in love with her ex (she really was the former, as much as Morris presents both sides).

We meet a few of the journalists involved in the coverage by each paper, a few of her former associates and McKinney herself. They all tell very different stories of the events, though one general narrative emerges over the course of the film. It is indeed interesting how each person sees the story differently based on his or her knowledge of the events and their stakes in the drama.

We never get, however, a real deep look into McKinney, the way we might have had of Fred Leuchter (Mr. Death) or Robert McNamara (The Fog of War). The film is ultimately just as shallow as the tabloid stories were to begin with. We never really see why this story was such a big deal - or if it really was a big deal outside of these two papers. It's clear that she was on the front pages for a few weeks or months, but we don't get any context or when she stopped being on the pages. The fact that the film is called Tabloid is a mystery to me, as the it is much more about McKinney than it is about the papers.

Clearly Morris is an artist and a master filmmaker, so he knows what to do and how to make something look good. He uses lots of found footage, industrial films and clips from old Hollywood pictures (not unlike Bruce Connor might have done). He uses his now-standard "Interatron" (or is the "Megatron"?) to interview his subjects (basically it's a two way teleprompter where the person sees the interviewer's face on a screen, through which the camera shoots the person). (I worry this style is getting a bit tired, honestly).

It all feels a bit like Philip Roth's novella Everyman, which was well received, but rather a phoned-in work in the overview of his oeuvre. Everyman was a re-hashing of the same ideas Roth had struggled with for the previous decade and brought nothing new to the table. Tabloid does not expand Morris universe and fits in much more with his First Person documentary television show (which is generally great).

I hope Morris can pick himself up, dust off the rather cynical and silly anti-Mormon junk and move on to make more interesting films. I hope this isn't the first sign that he's losing his magical touch (the way I worry Roth has in recent years). Just like Roth, though, Morris makes good art, it's just that it's not even close to what he's done in the past.

Seen in a vacuum this is a good movie, but seen from the inside of Morris' work, it looks like a failure. As I write that, I think about Morris' brilliant examination of an "event horizon" in A Brief History of Time. Oh, how the mighty has fallen.

Stars: 2.5 of 4