Review: Tabloid

July 21, 2011

In 1977, Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen with the most all-American of images, became a British tabloid celebrity for allegedly kidnapping and repeatedly raping a Mormon missionary who was fulfilling his religious duties in London. She had met the young man, Kirk Anderson, a few years before while living in Utah and, after spending just two days with him, knew that he was the man for her. As Joyce tells it, she and Kirk were truly in love and all of his behavior following their short-lived romance, from his unannounced departure to Europe to his court testimony that he was an unwilling participant in shackled coitus, was the product of Mormon brainwashing designed to keep them apart.

It is this sense of conviction–an unyielding, near manic will to tell her side of the events–that the famed documentarian Errol Morris explores in his new documentary, Tabloid. Like Morris’ last two films, The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure, the initial goal, it seems, was to find the truth in a story that had been the subject of reckless media speculation. But Tabloid is a different animal from those two because McKinney is the polar opposite of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Abu Ghraib truth-teller Lynndie England. Morris’ prior subjects were hardly warm and candid, but we felt as though we really got to the bottom of their stories by the ends of their respective documentaries, through both implicit and explicit readings of their interviews. McKinney, by contrast, is a real chatterbox, telling Morris everything he wants to know and more, but most audience members won’t have the faintest clue if she’s telling the truth. Making the publicity rounds, Morris has confessed that he doesn’t know, either, but says he thinks that whatever the case, Joyce fully believes her version of the story. Confronting this dynamic, Tabloid becomes less about finding the truth in the events ala the filmmaker’s previous films and more about finding the truth in the people involved. Kirk Anderson refused to be interviewed, but Morris spends a fascinating hour and a half studying Joyce and two employees of the tabloids (Daily Express and The Mirror) that made her a celebrity by offering competing versions of the story.

Those of us who are too young to remember the story will spend the beginning of the film reveling in the very odd details that initially drew the interest of the tabloids–on paper, Joyce seems like the last person who would pull something like this–but Morris, in reliable form, probes far beyond the surface. Whether the result is a portrait of an eccentric, an artist, a madwoman, or someone in between is the viewer’s to decide. Even if we are to believe Joyce that Kirk consented to leaving his Mormon brethren and having sex with her, the way she went about accomplishing such a rendezvous was decidedly out of the ordinary. We hear from Jackson Shaw, the Los Angeles pilot who she hired (presumably with her extensive modeling earnings) to take she, friend and alleged plan-mastermind Keith May (now deceased), and a bodyguard (!) to England. He seems like a sane individual, but all these years later is still alarmingly enamored with Joyce–charmed and, by self-admission, attracted–that he speaks of her fondly rather than accusatorially. Then there is Joyce’s gleeful telling of how she and Keith escaped back to the United States despite pending charges in England, hopping on a rock band’s private plane to Canada and then gaining the sympathies of the border patrol by pretending to be deaf. They were never extradited and never served prison sentences.

McKinney’s story only got more peculiar in 2008, when she once again made headlines for having her beloved dead dog Booger cloned by South Korean scientists. This is where Morris’ film comes full-circle as a character study, putting aside all pretense of getting the cut-and-dry facts of Joyce’s exploit 30 years before. I’ll leave the details of why Joyce loved Booger enough to have him cloned for $50,000 unspoiled–this passage is perhaps the most jaw-dropping in the film–but I will say that it works beautifully for Morris’ narrative in that it sheds light on how and why she loves. (Her canine connection is the closest thing she has ever had to her love for Kirk.) Even though Morris’ traditionally long-form interviews are staged like a confessional to the audience, with a subject as enigmatic as Joyce, actions are just as valuable as words, making the cloning segment especially meaningful.

What struck me most about Joyce as I watched the film is that, even though she is overwhelmingly eager to boast about herself (she claims to have an IQ of 168) and self-advocate in her defense, she does not at all come across as a narcissist. On paper, there are plentiful parallels between Joyce’s personality and those of embroiled politicians like Rod Blagojevich, but in practice, they are non-existent. Deluded as she may be, the last thing Joyce is, is phony. We are so lucky, as moviegoers, to have Morris as the man to bring her story to the screen, for he is one of a select few filmmakers capable of capturing such subtle but essential distinction.

* * *

Tabloid (2011, USA). Produced by Julie Ahlberg, Ajae Clearway, Robert Fernandez, and Mark Lipson. Directed by Errol Morris. Featuring interviews with Joyce McKinney, Jackson Shaw, Peter Tory, Troy Williams, Kent Gavin, and Dr. Jin Han Hong. Distributed by IFC Films. Not rated, with a running time of 87 minutes.