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.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth