Review of Tabloid (2011) by Shane S — 15 Nov 2013

A hilariously tragic story about a girl whose devotion to true love gets her into a lot of trouble with the press, Errol Morris' "Tabloid" is simultaneously entertaining, enlightening, jaw-dropping, comical, and surreal - how could this sort of thing exist? How do people do these things? Why would they do this? At first, you want to side with Joyce - she sounds so earnest in her mannerisms and she comes across as a person whose thirst for the American dream destroyed her. At second glance, you want to side with the Express and Mirror reporters - they've done the most research regarding Joyce's life and figured out that she was pretty secretive with this other side of her that she doesn't want out. And then we go to Kirk - the man is scared shitless of Joyce to this day.

And then you realize: there is no answer. What exactly happened in that cottage in Devon is lost to time. Kirk's viewpoint - his intense chastity and religious-bred sexual guilt - is ultimately biased. Same with Joyce's - she's obviously hurt by her past actions and does not want to admit to them (which would make her the bad guy, which, to be fair, she isn't - throughout the film, you get the notion that she's a girl who has good intentions that went sour one day in 1977). And same with the reporters - they only care about sensationalism and they admit that they were trying to make Joyce appear to be a horrible person (while keeping some base characteristics - her chastity). And I'm sure as hell Jackson Shaw doesn't know shit about what happened at the cottage - he and the bodyguard left before the kidnapping could take place.

So who knows? Nobody knows. And that's the point of Tabloid - there are moments in real life where people don't know the actual outcome. This is a truly ambiguous story that manages to be entertaining in all ways. I want to say it's on par or even better than the Thin Blue Line and the Fog of War, but purists say that nothing will beat those stories. I say that Robert McNamara's sage advice on diplomacy and Randall Adams' desire to be a good man who was given the short straw are topped only by Joyce McKinney's devotion to insanity.

So, um, this is Errol Morris' magnum opus. And it's proof that he's one of the few great storytellers of the modern era. He doesn't need all of the elements of a story as the narrative fiction film sees it - he needs talking heads and all possible points of view.