Nowadays, anyone who points a digital camera at any topic can call himself a documentary filmmaker, and if he goes in for splashy hackneyed computer graphics, he might sell the film to cable. Errol Morris, on the other hand, is the real thing: a documentarian of depth and nuance who is actually a great director.
Tabloid, the latest from the filmmaker behind the Oscar winning Fog of War, peers into the life and exploits of a woman who garnered plenty of press in the \'70s on both sides of the Atlantic—and for all the wrong reasons. Joyce McKinney, the former Miss Wyoming, went to England to kidnap her apparently estranged fiancé. Whether he was kept entirely against his will, as he claimed in court, can\'t be determined. Her fiancé, whom she claimed had simply “evaporated,” was a Mormon who had embarked to Britain for his expected missionary work. In the press she was accused of manacling and raping the young man. In one of her sharper rejoinders, she wonders how a man can be raped. He either has an erection or not!
Morris moves Tabloid along a sequence of interviews with McKinney, a garrulous, flighty woman born to be on TV talk shows. Brief black screens segment the interviews, which are often imaginatively illustrated with real or simulated home movies, snippets from antique B flicks, ironic animation and imaginative collages and juxtapositions, much of it visualizing the roots of McKinney\'s fantasy world in the debris of soap opera and Hollywood romantic melodrama. What she calls love fits the clinical definition of delusion and obsession.
Much of McKinney\'s story remains lost in those black screens, in spite of Morris\' interviews with several people who knew her. “I wanted a special guy,” she says of the man of her fever dreams. “He always had the cleanest skin.” Herself a product of evangelical Protestantism, she had no comprehension of his Mormonism and saw herself on a mission to “liberate him from a cult.” A British tabloid writer who covered her 1977 trial in the U.K. described her as “barking mad” and he\'s almost certainly correct, albeit absolute certainty is something Morris seems to distrust. That same writer lets slip that he may have exaggerated a few details for the sake of storytelling. Why should the director of Fog of War, the acclaimed documentary on Robert McNamara, spend his time on a loon like Joyce McKinney? The public fascination with her reveals about our society, although Morris leaves it to our imagination to determine what that might be.
Tabloid is out on DVD.
