Karina on SpoutBlog

Personal documentaries rarely operate under the aesthetic and narrative rules of horror films, incorporating shocking Shyamalan-esque twist endings, but Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father does, so it’s fitting that Oscilloscope are beginning its roll out on Halloween. When filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s childhood best friend Andrew Bagby was killed at the age of 32, almost certainly by his years-older jilted girlfriend Shirley Turner, Kuenne began filming testimony from his friends and family as a memorial to his lost friend. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that Andrew’s probable killer, who though charged with the crime had not yet been extradicted from Canada, was pregnant with Andrew’s child, and as Andrew’s parents Kate and David moved to Newfoundland and fought for custody of the baby, Kuenne drove across the continent from California to conduct interviews. At that point, he restructured the project: it was now a filmed letter addressed to baby Zachary, about the man his father was. But before Kuenne finished filming, the story would take another, much more devastating turn. It may be impossible to talk about Dear Zachary in terms of craft without spoiling the real-life twist which compromises the integrity of its structure, but I’ll try to be as vague as I can.

The story itself is unbelievably compelling: Bagby met Turner, twelve years his senior and twice divorced, as a medical student. They dated on and off for a couple of years, and when Andrew broke it off, Shirley drove across the country to see him and, apparently, shot him five times in the middle of a park. She then headed off to Newfoundland, where snafus in the Canadian legal system insured that she kept at least partial custody of Andrew’s son Zachary, even as she moved in and out of prison. Dear Zachary moves at a breakneck pace, often edited to Kuenne’s breathless, almost staccato narration, which is itself sometimes backed by a creepy, Psycho-like score. Kuenne conducts tons of interviews with Andrew’s friends and members of his large, close family, which the filmmaker chops up into flashes and weaves back together thematically. On initial viewing, only those closest to Andrew pop out as characters from what otherwise plays like a blanket of overlapping sentiment.

Kuenne is wise to let Andrew’s parents, seated together on a couch in a basic two-shot, tell the backbone of the story. Mother Kate, often teary, rarely makes eye contact with the camera, but father David, still clearly livid, often looks directly at us while detailing their relationship with “that fucking bitch” Shirley. Seen mostly in still photographs which seem to always freeze her in a state of manic motion, Shirley is blonde, skinny, with wild eyes hidden behind librarian glasses. The most compelling evidence to support the Bagby’s horror story comes from recordings of their phone calls with her and Shirley’s hysteric voicemails. Her voice is naturally sing-song in the creepiest way imaginable, and Kuenne gets a lot of mileage out of pulling soundbites like “Mommy loves you!” out of context and into the fabric of his horror movie soundtrack.

About two-thirds of the way through, a second crime is committed, at which point the pretense that this is “a letter to a son about his father” is no longer applicable. Dear Zachary then becomes many things –– a harangue against the broken child services system of Newfoundland, an advertisement for David Bagby’s new career as a legal activist (he published a bestselling book about the Turner case in 2007), and, as Kuenne puts it in a bit of narration towards the end, “a letter to someone else.” At this point, as a viewer it’s hard to not feel as though your sympathies have been taken advantage of. Ironically, in being honest about how, when and why his project changes focus, Kuenne has to initially lie to his audience. He documents an undeniably affecting personal story, and patches it together like a short attention span scrapbook with his fingerprints intact, but there’s something about it which feels false enough to undercut some of its potential power. In its title and initial structure, Dear Zachary sets up a foundation which it knows it’s going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film.

Under discussion:

Changeling  (2008)

I have not been kind to Changeling, the Angelina Jolie-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed Oscar bait which opens wide today –– but admittedly, I also haven’t taken it very seriously. After seeing the supposed true-to-life drama at the New York Film Festival last month, I made the snap judgment that the film didn’t deserve my time –– it was such a silly, blatant exercise in statuette fishing, I thought, that the energy that I could expend detailing all its faults and falsehoods would be much better spent elsewhere. And certainly, plenty of other critics have covered some of the film’s key problematic factors. Dana Stevens‘ review pretty much sums it up, whether she’s citing Eastwood’s “clomping heavy-handedness” or his need to create a “deeply phony moral universe” in which to surround his victim-as-martyr manipulation shtick, which “keeps us at a stately remove, presenting Christine’s suffering as a kind of religious tableau.” But it was a throwaway line in A.O. Scott’s NYT review that made me realize that Changeling isn’t just a bad film –– it’s the final sign in a long line of them that Angelina Jolie, as we once knew her, has ceased to exist. That’s worth a minute or two.

Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek, and Ella Taylor are among the many critics who have noted that Jolie is essentially miscast in the role of Christine Collins, a fragile woman who hides her slightly hunched, rail-thin frame behind flowing layers and a giant cloche hat. Jolie’s strength, her sex appeal, the almost otherworldly confidence that makes her so genuinely fun to watch as a blockbuster anchor –– there’s room for none of that to shine through in this dreary story of a single mother who is suckered into an LAPD conspiracy, and yet manages to stay weepily polite about it for a good 80% of the film, even when dragged into the loony bin. It’s who she meets when she gets to said institution that really throws the split between the Angelina Jolie who wants an Oscar now, and the Angelina Jolie who won an Oscar eight years ago –– and trumped her own victory headline before the night was out by kissing her brother –– into sharp relief. After noting that “something essential is missing, not only from [Jolie's] performance but also from the film as a whole,” Scott runs down a bit of the plot and eventually gets to the matter of Christine’s incarceration in the police-controlled mental hospital, “where she meets Amy Ryan, who is to this movie more or less what Ms. Jolie was to Girl, Interrupted.”

I’ve pulled this line out of context; in the review, it’s in parentheses at the end of a paragraph, as if it’s an aside, as if this isn’t the only thing about this movie that could potentially even matter. Because Scott is right: In Changeling, Angelina Jolie cedes the Angelina Jolie role to Amy Ryan so that she can take the ill-fitting Winona Ryder role: the frightened, sexless, allegedly sympathetic but ultimately boring, straight woman who can’t take control of a desperate situation until a much stronger woman shows her how it’s done.

In Girl, Interrupted, Jolie was just supposed to set up the pins of Ryder’s long-nurtured Oscar-baiting vanity project so that the lead actress (and at the time, much bigger star) could knock them down. It didn’t work that way, and really Ryder should have known better than to assume that her comparatively prim self-consciousness would have a chance up against the larger-than-life Jolie in the much flashier role. Jon Voight’s daughter had been slowly building an image for several years as uncomfortable Hollywood royalty, rebelling via the usual means –– tattoos, knives, bisexuality, a foolish lack of filter and willingness to promote her own libertinism — but the added spotlight afforded by the run-up to the Girl, Interrupted Oscar suddenly made her growing pains seem glamorous. Her tough girl hedonism and its extreme difference from co-star Ryder’s boyish, non-threatening, very early-90s sexuality made the latter seem outmoded.

Amy Ryan, already an established character actress and Oscar nominee, will probably not see the same bump in celebrity, but her character plays the same catalyst role as Jolie’s in Interrupted, and the performance similarly cracks Changeling wide open. She plays mouthy, ballsy (but kind-hearted!) prostitute Carol who imparts on Christine the learned wisdom that she’ll need to survive in This Place while upholding little interest in self-preservation. To her captors, she telegraphs the illusion that she cannot be contained, but Christine understands that her new friend’s rebellion is actually a kind of theater, and what’s more, it’s more often than not selfless–Carol acts up to distract attenton away from Christine, and ultimately, offers herself to up to punishments so that Christine will be spared. We thus understand that Christine is victim of the system, the one who doesn’t belong in This Place, while Carol — even if she’s innocent of the psychiatric charges against her — has no normal life to go back to. She has nothing to lose, and so she’ll go through everything and anything so that our heroine can’t come out free.

One wants to be upset at Jolie for going for the bloodless supposed Oscar sure thing at the expense of playing to what we perceive as her strengths, as if her own experience netting a statuette should have taught her the folly of such a thing. The “old” Angelina would never have done such a thing, we sniff. As if the “old” Angelina Jolie — the tattooed man-eater, the weird girl on the cover of MAXIM who seemed to be enacting the revenge of the teenage outcast –– ever really meant as much as she seemed to mean, for awhile, just by virtue of existing. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to remember that this woman once seemed like a loose-canon anecdote to the industry of celebrity, before she became its chief moving cog.

The fact is, Angelina Jolie has become such a huge star, she’s so overseen, that now it’s as if she can’t be seen. And so she can front a disposable film like Wanted on bad girl autopilot and rack up the box office victory, and no one comments on her performance because she has become so practiced at that kind of role that there’s no longer anything to say. It’s east to forget that Jolie is only now typecasted because she was somehow able to invent a new type of type. What made Jolie initially impressive and exciting––that she was simultaneously scary and sexy, smart and strong, unpredictable but in control––has been flattened down into the Angelina Jolie brand, and that brand has become a summer blockbuster mainstay. She’ll never be able to impress us with it again. And yet, when she deviates from her persona––on the rare occasions when she dares to actually show up and try––it’s read as desperate Oscar baiting. It’s a no win.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t complain. There’s a scene in Changeling where, in a desperate, futile gesture, Jolie hurls a plate of macaroni at a wall (yes, it’s that kind of film) and shrieks, “I want MY son back!” It’s hard to watch the film and not think, “I want MY Angelina Jolie back!”