Review: TABLOID

rating: 3.5

A fascinating look at obsession and newspaper politics 2007's incendiary though little-seen documentary 'Crazy Love' disturbingly examined people's capacity to love in even the most horrific circumstances. Though thankfully not quite as aggravating in its injustice as that film, Errol Morris' latest work, 'Tabloid', runs along the same lines, examining love's amazing potential to border on insanity in its most blatant terms, in telling a prototypical tale of beauty and the beast and using this as a jumping-off point on which to examine journalistic ethics, the importance of representation, and the power of the news media machine. 'Tabloid' documents the infamous "Manacled Mormon" case of the late 1970s, where the former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, fearing that her Mormon boyfriend, Kirk Anderson, had been brainwashed against pursuing a relationship with her, decides to "retrieve" him from the apparently cult-like Mormon sect at all costs (by abducting him with a pistol, chaining him up and reportedly having sex with him for three days). Interpretted as a kidnapping by the Mormons and received dubiously by the British headline-grabbing media, Morris interviews those willing to discuss the case (unsurprisingly, Anderson was not) in order to try and decipher the truth. Though uncovering nothing on the earth-shatteringly revelatory level of his The Thin Blue Line (which resulted in an wrongly convicted man being freed from prison), Morris probes deep, laying all possible information out before the viewer to ultimately decide for themselves because, frankly, we will never know who was really right. Joyce McKinney is a truly fascinating subject; even in this talking-head doc format, and having now lost her slender figure, she is an incredibly charming woman. The picture painted of her, despite her evident eccentricity, is that of a hopeless romantic (by her own admission), rather amusingly regarding her own not dating until 17 years of age as making her a "late bloomer". Between her attempts to rationalise her behaviour to us, Morris speaks to those most intimately involved with the case, such as a gossip columnist for the Daily Express, Peter Tory, who tries to make sense of the story's most fundamentally baffling element; Joyce is hot, and Kirk is not. Despite the fairly standard delivery, there is an agreeably fleeting, pop-up style to this doc; Morris displays a grand surplus of detail on the screen at any one given time, be it newspaper clippings pasted together on-screen, supplementary text suddenly appearing to accentuate an interviewee's statement, or the various animations, newspaper clippings and even film clips that that provide us with a frequently amusing visual reference - no matter how oblique - to what is going on. However, the indiscriminate cuts to black - rather than simply cutting instantly between strands of relevant dialogue - seem quite unnecessary and are jarring to watch. As with any of Morris' documentaries, Tabloid is thematically rich beyond the bounds of its central focus. Most interesting is his engagement with the notion of journalistic ethics; indicting himself rather enthusastically, Peter Tory notes that he in fact has no idea whether Joyce bound Kirk to the bed with handcuffs or rope, but that the verb "chained" simply sounded so much more delicious. Tory is evidently a relic of a very different journalistic age, in which litigation for libel was relatively uncommon, and journos themselves were celebrities; there is an amusing episode detailed in which Tory went to a film premiere with Joyce, who promptly upstaged Joan Collins. Furthermore, the doc briefly examines the relatively ambiguous role of the Mormon church in all of this. Using an ex-missionary as a guide of sorts through their seemingly mad rituals, we come to learn how Kirk's overwhelming guilt after having sex with Joyce would have essentially been too powerful for any non-Mormon to fully comprehend. In poring over the gritty details of the couple's sexual activity, Morris also confronts interesting social questions, such as whether a woman can actually rape a man; McKinney puts it hilariously with an indelicate analogy about a marshmallow and a parking meter that brought the house down at the LFF screening. Reflexively (given the film's own complicity in this very issue), Morris also discusses representation and the media's role, for after some apparently real, lewd pictures of Joyce emerged, The Mirror painted her as a whore, while The Express showed her as a God-fearing, innocent woman. The two extremes are interesting in cementing how black and white news coverage can be, of a stringent, single-minded mind-set for the sake of striking a powerful, memorable chord rather than detailing what is fair or reasoned. The obsession here is one worth portraying not only because it had widespread media attention, but because it was a unique obsession that had incredible staying power; with its ever-presence in the media - even in being resurged by this doc - it surely only feeds her continuing obsession with Kirk. Joyce has no doubt had a sad life, and if the cinema's hysterical reaction to most every of Joyce's declarations is any indication, it seems that we are laughing at rather than with her. By the end, we have learned a lot about her, but in it is a lot of sadness and seemingly not much happiness. The story simply gets more incredible and unbelievable as it goes along, but for the most part it is so implausible because Joyce allows it to be, for she clearly loves the drama and the artifice of it all, be it ecstatic pleasure or grating agony. 'Tabloid' recently had it's U.K. premiere at the LFF.