Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has always been attracted to eccentric people – see 1981’s “Vernon, Florida” and 1997’s “Fast, Cheap
and Out of Control.” But his latest film, “Tabloid,” takes the strangeness cake, while exploring a figure just as notorious and high-profile, in her way, as Morris’more recent documentary subjects: Robert McNamara and the U.S. forces involved in the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.
“Tabloid” charts the rise and fall – but mostly the fall – of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen from Wyoming who tantalized the British and American presses in the late ’70s by kidnapping, chaining to a bed and “raping” the Mormon missionary “fiance” who had abandoned her to give his life to God (or Joseph Smith). Full of kink, bondage, costumed espionage and cultlike religious customs, the case was a whale of a tale, compelling even for those high-minded art-house moviegoers who wouldn’t touch a New York Post with Anthony Weiner’s…well, you know.
But how truthful are the humans recounting it in front of Morris’ camera, each trying to save face and propel their own agendas? The quotation marks I used above are necessary because, as with most Morris movies, the veracity is deliberately obscured and open to viewers’ interpretations. In his one-on-one interviews with McKinney, Morris establishes her, from the get-go, as an unreliable narrator, to say the least. She plays both victim and instigator in her own demise – a downfall triggered by a tabloid press corps hungry for salacious and tawdry content. We may not believe all, if most, of what McKinney says, but she’s just as trustworthy as the guttersnipe editors of the British tabloids (also interviewed by Morris), who dug up dirt on the supposedly pure-of-heart beauty queen’s X-rated sexual escapades and call-girl advertisements that could easily have been doctored even then (The original negatives, they say, were conveniently destroyed in a newsroom relocation).
The way I see it, McKinney is both the film’s comic relief – to avoid paparazzi and to complete her covert activities, she would disguise herself in costumes like a cartoon character, waiting for a proverbial Acme anvil to quell her schemes – and its tragic center, a delusional and desperate woman with severe mental health issues. She is certainly not the antagonist. Morris assigns this role to the tabloid culture that made McKinney a household name and continues to prop troubled individuals like Nadya Suleman, Casey Anthony and Lisa Marie Nowak (remember the astronaut diaper story?) into limelights and flashbulbs they never desired or deserved. That the movie is opening across the country at the same time The News of the World, a similar tabloid rag, has fallen under the weight of its own sleaze, is a happy coincidence. In dusting off a decades-only story of little consequence, Morris has made the definitive statement about the media world we live in now.
“Tabloid” opens Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, and the Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.
