Tabloid

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: The critical chatter around Tabloid, Errol Morris’s featherweight follow-up to the grossly overblown Standard Operating Procedure, included one key phrase: “Minor Morris,” lone colleague said, “but entertaining nonetheless.” I found the rumours mostly to be true, though I suspect this gleeful romp through the dubious history (and sanity) of one Joyce McKinney might be a minor—or at least frivolous—documentary for someone who wasn’t Errol Morris as well.

Morris’s (patent-pending) Interrotron is in full effect, which means that we meet the former southern beauty queen (and still blowsy-lovely) McKinney face to face, as it were, answering Morris’s questions about her romance with and alleged kidnapping and rape of a Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson directly to camera. What Morris must have rejoiced over is immediately apparent to the viewer as well: McKinney is a ridiculously juicy subject, as colloquial and chatty as the day is long, unhinged and unnervingly pert in the tradition of a Stephen King spinster. Morris intersperses her account of the 1977 events with those of several of the other people involved—some were accomplices of the personal variety, others were aligned with the media machine that turned the “Mormon Sex In Chains” headline into bales and bales of tabloid hay.

Here, as with films like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, we are positioned as a sort of jury, although rather than presenting its various witnesses plainly, Morris can’t seem to resist gussying up their witty, indicting or more absurdist moments with winking tabloid effects. When a would-be suitor describes the “totally see-through” top McKinney was wearing when they first met, the words “TOTALLY SEE THROUGH” fill the screen, as if the old man’s leer didn’t speak for itself. Every new face is stamped with a moniker (McKinney’s is “Ex-Beauty Queen,” an ungentlemanly glib introduction), and flashy, self-amused use of the reports that surrounded the case add to the rather stale air of “IRREVERENCE.”

It’s easy enough to be entertained by the diverting Tabloid; personally I would have rather been engaged with something more on the nose. The thrill of his best work has always been the feeling of collaboration with a director in pursuit of what’s real, whom to believe, and just what kind of story is being told. Here the feeling is one of collusion and condescension, and of watching a story with some truly fascinating raw materials get a half-hearted pass from the master.

There are moments of brilliance, it is true: One of the tabloid editors, in recalling the allegations that McKinney tied the kidnapped Anderson to the bed, notes that he’s pretty sure she used rope to bind him, but chains sounds better, and so chains it is. (Anderson, reportedly now a real estate agent, did not participate in the film; a former Mormon testifies vigorously about the “brainwashing” he would have been subject to in the church, and the torment sexual contact would have caused him.) McKinney has an explanation for every incredulous step of the way, and in that case claims that she had read in a Christian sex manual that impotence in the very religious can be sometimes cured by incapacitating the man physically; feeling that the matter is now out of his hands, he relaxes. To see these words come out of McKinney’s mouth while she seems to look you in the eye will blow a small corner of your mind; the more specious allegations that she worked for years as an S&M call girl get a more problematic treatment. Footage that McKinney took of the grounds surrounding her home—it would seem as part of a case she was building against a neighbour’s yapping dog—also suggests a more subtle, troubling direction for a pretty freewheeling film. McKinney repeats the shot, with minor variations in the angle and her narration, maybe half a dozen times: Which take is the one she’d choose? Which version best presents her case?

I won’t spoil the outcome of McKinney’s case for the uninitiated, though I can’t resist repeating her stubborn, Scarlett O’Hara correction of the record regarding her jumping bail and escaping England before her sentence was handed down: “I didn’t flee; I left.” It’s hard to blame Morris for indulging himself on stuff like that, or McKinney’s bizarre 2008 cloning of her beloved dog into a litter of puppies bred in a South Korean lab. On the same day in 1977 McKinney appeared on the cover of London’s Daily Mail in a nun’s habit, and was branded a whore on the cover of the Daily Mirror. “Somewhere in between is the truth,” the Mail editor mused. I left Tabloid thinking the same thing, and wishing Morris had brought us a little closer to it.