Tabloid - 2010 - 4 Stars

Director: Errol Morris
Subject: "The Case of the Manacled Mormon"

Tabloid is the story of Joyce McKinney and "The Case of the Manacled Mormon", it is a story best discovered as one watches the film and I would suggest people watch this movie with as little prior knowledge as possible. Morris manages to get interviews with most of the principles involved in the story, including two exceedingly British tabloid journalists, who touch not only on the specific case, but the nature of being a young tabloid journalist in the gossip-hungry UK.  

As an effete intellectual, I am supposed to be dismissive about tabloid stories, but every now and then get sucked into the vortex of a tabloid story. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of 2011 watching the Charlie Sheen meltdown, but eventually I stopped because I was bored. High profile tabloid stories are monotonous, they take years to play out and are constantly reported on. This is why family-members, high school teachers, secretaries and other peripheral players will inevitably get hounded by reporters: tabloids need to find something, anything, to report on. In Charlie Sheen's case the first 15 minutes of his daily free-associative rambling was top-notch lunacy, but following several hours of daily interviews, UStream live chats, twitter rants and assorted ephemera became overwhelming and repetitive. E! True Hollywood Story and other copycats, made me skeptical of a documentary about a tabloid story, but in retrospect these types of stories are perfect fodder for documentaries because a skilled filmmaker can excise all the fat and create a captivating highlight reel.

Errol Morris is one of the few documentarians who can make their movies fun, without interjecting themselves in the middle of them. Morris' career is based around documenting the actions of eccentrics, he is so successful because he respects the humanity of his subjects, which allows them to open up. Morris smartly refrains from explicitly judging the principals and allows the audience to make up their mind via first-hand interviews with McKinney and secondary characters in "The Case of the Manacled Mormon". From the opening credit sequences Morris embraces the pulpy fun of Tabloid through a series of visual flourishes, whether he is panning to a campy cartoon that explains Mormonism or superimposing tabloid headlines over talking heads as if they were onomatopoeia in Adam West's Batman.

Every time I finish a Morris film I am amazed at how his subjects answer almost every direct question honestly: he taps into a natural human inclination to tell the truth when directly confronted with it. Throughout the film there are moments we think McKinney is lying, but we also believe she is so deluded that she thinks she is telling the truth. This film is a must watch for film fans, because Morris as per usual found a captivating subject for a documentary, but it is also an excellent takedown of tabloid journalism. In just under 90 minutes he manages to succinctly and thoroughly condense a story that ran off and on for 30 years that is so captivating because the historical distance eliminates the ephemera that is a byproduct of round the clock coverage.