Tabloid
Time Out New York Project: Issue #821, July 14-20, 2011 (Online Only)
★★★☆☆
Dir. Errol Morris. 2010. N/R. 87mins. Documentary.
Beauty queen. Mormon bogeyman. Attention hog. Dog cloning proponent. To his ever-growing gallery of eccentrics, Errol Morris now adds Joyce McKinney, a Midwest firecracker with a life story that made for exceptional tabloid fodder. A former Miss Wyoming with a 168 IQ, she made headlines when she traveled to Britain in 1977 to rescue (although others would say to kidnap) the Mormon love of her life, Kirk Anderson. The gun she had was fake, but the Smith and Wesson handcuffs were very real — and apparently used to shackle the maybe-willing, maybe-not LDS member to the bed of an isolated country cottage for a three-day bout of lovemaking.
Joyce was eventually captured and the story blew up, to the point that, free on bail, the scandal sheet starlet upstaged Joan Collins at the premiere of her movie The Stud — surely, Alexis Carrington was not amused. Then the story gets even more bizarre. The director uses his bewitching bag of tricks to tell McKinney’s story: Visually off-kilter talking head interviews, ironically employed archival clips (funniest is the use of Franco Zeffirelli’s period romance Brother Sun, Sister Moon). Yet unlike a great Morris film such as Gates of Heaven or Mr. Death, where the quirks of character feel connected to a larger, profoundly insightful vision of humanity, Tabloid never gets beyond its idiosyncratic surface. Morris too often treats McKinney as a figure of fun, holding on her roiling laugh for cringe-inducing effect, and, at worst, indulging the woman’s grand delusions — such as her oft-stated desire to author a biographical tell-all — like a sleazy rag reporter looking for a scoop. Sad to say, but this is a master going through the motions.—Keith Uhlich