Review of Tabloid (2011) by Kenneth L — 21 Dec 2013

This is the first movie I've seen by the famous documentarian Errol Morris, and while it's not about anything terribly serious or important, it is a zippy, fun little movie about a strange, indeed tabloid-worthy story.

The film is about Joyce McKinney, a former American beauty queen who, in 1977, became infamous in England for allegedly kidnapping, chaining up, and raping her Mormon fiance there. She got in legal trouble, but escaped the country and came back to America.

She was in the British tabloids for about a year all told, and came up in the news again many years later when she had a dead dog cloned for her in South Korea. Morris's method in the film is very simple - he interviewed McKinney herself, now in her 60s, and a few other people who were somehow or other involved in the whole scandal, and shows us their answers as they talk directly to the camera.

He also supplements their stories with stock footage, photographs, and some Monty-Python-esque animation. Morris provides little explicit commentary or interpretation; we rarely even hear the questions he asks.

Instead, he lets the people tell their own stories, and occasionally seems to suggest things through the images he uses. In all, it's not a major film, but it is a very entertaining one.