Returning to the brand of oddball human interest documentary which made his name is the 1980s (Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida) after recent forays into darker tales of political scandal and a death-row device engineer (Standard Operating Procedure, Mr. Death) restless true life chronicler Errol Morris offers up one of his most entertaining efforts in Tabloid. The odd true-crime yarn of a former 1970s Midwest beauty queen infatuated with a Mormon missionary and the bizarre lengths she went to turn him away from the church – a scheme that led to her status as a fixture in the British tabloid newspapers. Morris employs his usual direct-camera technique to intimately interview most of the principles – including an extensive talk with the suspect Joyce McKinney – to allow the strange curves and detours of the sordid events to unfold in a series of surprising reveals straight from the mouths of the motley cast of those directly involved.
Morris is an old hand at finding fascinating subject matters that play into his unflinching curiosity for the eccentric outer banks of human behavior – the most singular remains his debut film about the proprietors of a pet cemetery (Gates of Heaven, 1978). I’m not sure where he heard of the strange happenings when Joyce McKinney plotted to rescue her devoutly Mormon fiancée from those “brainwashing” him at an English LDS church, but Morris hit on a story ripe with salacious details, conflicting accounts, cloned animals, daring escapes, and a loopy narcissist at the heart of it all who has been going around to theaters playing Tabloid to complain of her misrepresentation in a film full of her own self-damning words.
McKinney is one of the more interesting characters to appear on film screens this year – a lovely blonde in her twenties with her pick of suitors in 1977 when she decided to pursue her lover Kirk. When things went awry after a weekend of chained-up lovemaking, the Mormon Church had her arrested and sent her into the glare of dueling UK tabloids – one painting her as a babe in the woods, the other investigating her dark secret life in America. Morris takes the tabloid aesthetic to heart and drives points home with ironic splashes of found footage, cartoons, and a general air of story-for-story’s sake. No one ends up with an absolute truth in a Morris investigation – he couldn’t be less interested in closure – it is all in the joy of the telling.
Joyce McKinney as seen in Tabloid. © Sundance Selects
Tabloid unfolds at a brisk pace with a gleeful awareness that each odd new development is going to lead us to even stranger revelations. The “Manacled Mormon” case is still legend in English yellow journalism, but now Morris has given the case to new life with his peculiar brand of intelligent, puzzle-piece filmmaking. Tabloid is a real-life soap opera more dramatic, involving, and off-the-wall than anything you will find on reality television this summer.
Gregory Fichter
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