Review: Tabloid

Legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’ new film Tabloid is a perfect concoction of mystery, intrigue, entertainment, insanity, and hilarity. Many documentaries set out to educate, inform, and present a distinctive point of view as the only way to think about the ideas in the film, but Morris has taken a unique approach throughout his career, and with Tabloid, the truth of the matter remains difficult to ascertain.

The story itself is incredible, filled with the stuff of tabloid fantasies: kinky sexual acts, kidnapping, religion, brainwashing, and no way to know what really happened. In the late ’70s, a young American beauty queen, Joyce McKinney, falls in love with a Mormon man, Kirk Anderson, and after he is sent on a religious mission to England, she soon follows and what happens next is almost impossible to verify on any level. McKinney claims that Anderson left his church group with her willingly, that they proceeded to have a weekend together in the English countryside, eating his favorite foods and having copious amounts of sex before returning to London. But, when the police apprehended them, Anderson claimed that he was kidnapped by McKinney and an accomplice, shackled to a bed and forced to have sex with McKinney under a great amount of duress. McKinney was arrested along with her accomplice, and the trial was tabloid fodder for ages, the case of the beautiful young American and the manacled Mormon.

Decades later, Morris turns the camera to McKinney and allows her to tell her own wildly interesting version of the story, piecing it together with accounts from tabloid journalists who covered it at the time, an accomplice in the early stages of the kidnapping plot, as well as an ex-Mormon, and together the different perspectives add up to a fantastic and hilarious film.

Joyce McKinney is lively, entertaining, and completely consumed by her story; she is precisely the kind of subject that a documentary filmmaker must be delighted to find. One gets the feeling that this woman could ramble for days about her love for Anderson and explain away all the startling evidence of possible wrong-doing. Her love is pure obsession, and her demeanor is all good-will and bright joy. As people often do, many of the interviewees say things that are hilarious, and McKinney is especially given to this as she animatedly speaks of her devotion. Her turns of phrase are often uproarious, such as when she claims that Anderson did indeed desire to have intercourse with her, saying that the alternative would be like “putting a marshmallow in a parking meter.”

As McKinney continues to talk, deflecting any sense of impropriety or wrong-doing, it becomes harder to believe her. Her luminous smile and chipper demeanor only add to the certainty that she deeply believes her own story, and depending on your knowledge of the case before seeing the film, you may be swayed even further in your opinions one way or another. Tabloid builds slowly on itself, and with each new revelation the entire puzzle shifts once again.

The film is devoid of re-enactments or dramatic interpretations, instead relying on a remarkable amount of found tabloid materials and some footage of McKinney through the years. The documentary is gorgeous to watch, with the right amount of inlaid style, such as a wonderful musical score, and the on-screen written repetition of important phrases or key words. Sadly, the victim Kirk Anderson’s side of the story is conspicuously missing as he refused to speak to Morris, and has refused to speak about the case since the events occurred in the late ’70s.

To be the subject of such intense tabloid scrutiny once in one’s life would be strange enough, but McKinney found herself in the papers again much later in life for being the proud owner of some of the first cloned dogs, and she speaks with almost as much love for her beloved dog Booger as she did for Kirk Anderson. At times it’s impossible not to feel sorry for McKinney, and think of William H. Macy’s character in Magnolia, gently sobbing, “I have so much love to give.” However, McKinney is never sorry for herself in the interviews, and continues to weave her miraculous narrative around her like a protective spell.

By the end of Tabloid, we know more about the case in some ways, but still are no closer to an understanding of the truth of the matter. There are loads of unanswered questions, about the crime itself, as well as about McKinney herself. But what we are left with is fantastic. Morris has presented us with differing viewpoints and plenty of strange stories, but he takes a remarkably gentle hand with the narrative, allowing the audience to take it all in and decide for themselves. Some will see McKinney as she herself does: the victim in all of this, but many will see only a strange and sick woman, incredible in her ability to twist reality to suit her own purposes. Tabloid is an excellent film from one of the best documentary filmmakers working today, a film wrestling with reality and perception, literally ripped from the headlines.  In Tabloid, the truth is stranger than fiction, but the line between the two is almost impossible to glimpse, having been erased, challenged, and moved so many times over the years that what remains is a mental puzzle of the most delightful sort.

Grade: A