Cupid drew a sharply aimed arrow when he spied a South Carolina-born beauty queen and future tabloid superstar named Joyce McKinney, the subject of Errol Morris' latest study in magnificent obsession.
The film goes by "Tabloid," and it's one of the director's most squirrely matchups of form and content. In 1975, 25-year-old McKinney was driving around Provo, Utah, behind the wheel of her Corvette when she saw the man of her dreams behind the wheel of his own 'Vette: 19-year-old Kirk Anderson. After a romance of sorts, Anderson relocated to England to do missionary work — and to steer clear of the Southern belle who had insufficient respect for his Mormon temple garments.
But, in McKinney's eyes her man had disappeared and needed finding. With an accomplice, traveling by private plane from California accompanied by bodyguards, McKinney abducted Anderson outside a Mormon church 25 miles southeast of London. She then whisked him to a cottage in Devon, tied him to a bed either with chains or rope (accounts differ) and embarked on a three-day period either of consensual relations or sexual assault. Again, accounts differ. And always will in this instance.
Two years later, McKinney jumped bail prior to her kidnapping trial. And that's only part of the story told by Morris' "Tabloid." The rest of it touches on journalistic ethics, the lure of a potentially unreliable narrator and, in a left-field coda, dog cloning.
What motivated McKinney to do what she did, if we do in fact even know what she did? Morris declines an easy answer, partly because McKinney remains her own manic, scrambled, unique self, someone who sees her story as that of a free and loving spirit smacking headlong into a wall of Latter-day Saints repression. Partly too, "Tabloid" cannot provide an easy answer because Anderson refused Morris' request for an interview. Journalistically this hurts. But Morris is such a savvy, irony-tinged master of the essayist documentary form, McKinney's own perspective becomes a tabla rasa for all sorts of sexual, voyeuristic and media desires.
Morris gleans wonderful anecdotal material from, among others, private pilot Jackson Shaw, hired by McKinney to (in his words) "liberate her fiance from this cult group." Another key interview subject, London Daily Express gossip columnist Peter Tory, turns out to be a first-class wag and an apt spokesman for his profession.
In a less-enlightened era the British papers had a sneering field day with the notion of the hulking, doughy Anderson becoming McKinney's "sex slave." Had the genders been reversed, the story would've soured instantly. I'm not sure Morris has acknowledged fully the bitter taste of McKinney's 17 minutes of fame. There is plenty of artful snark afoot in "Tabloid," just as you find in many episodes of "This American Life" and other high-grade exemplars of sardonically chronicled eccentricity. A little less of it would've meant a stronger, more troubling investment in McKinney's ever-evolving persona. Also, I could do without certain stylistic flourishes, such as the falsely cheery archival film and advertising footage underscoring the folly of a subject's desires.
Yet "Tabloid" transcends its own wiseguy air. It sticks with you because McKinney's story has so many interesting wrinkles. Morris has said that his favorite American movie is Edgar G. Ulmer's fatalistic Poverty Row noir "Detour," a 1945 story of ill-fated love in which the antihero utters the voice-over: "I was an ordinary healthy guy. And she was an ordinary healthy girl. And when you add those two together you get an ordinary healthy romance."
That's all McKinney ever wanted, she says. One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, "Tabloid" reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.
"Tabloid"
Grade: 3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Genres: Documentary
Running Time: 88 min
MPAA Rating: R
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