98. 1922 (2017)
97. LOCKE (2014)
96. BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE (2018)
95. HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)
94. IT COMES AT NIGHT (2017)
93. A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014)
92. THE INVITATION (2015)
91. EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL, AND VILE (2019)
What Zac Efron gets right is the hollowness. I have a feeling it's easy to method-act cunning, driven, angry, forlorn, or enthusiastic characters, but hollow is hard. The sense that there's nothing behind the eyes but craftiness. Deception. Planning the next move. No emotions except strategic ones. Hollowness.
Efron and director Joe Berlinger wisely avoid humanizing Ted Bundy, or rationalizing his motives, or explaining his background. It doesn't matter why he is. He just is.
Bundy confessed to murdering 30 people between 1974 and 1978. We don't see any of those murders on screen; we only see the prelude to one of them, and it's a visualization of one of Bundy's confessions. Truth be told, there's very little violence in this film at all, but it feels more violent than it is. That's because the violence is in Bundy's manipulation of the people around him, in his charm and charisma that enamor him to women, in his bland white Republican normalcy that enables him to fade into the background of suburban America.
Except for some glimpses, we see Bundy mostly through the eyes of his girlfriend Liz (Lily Collins), a single mother who is charmed by him one night at a bar and is soon inviting him into her life. Of course, Ted would never harm her: not because he feels an emotional connection to her at all, but because he would be easily caught. Once suspicion falls upon him for a murder in far-away Utah, Liz wants to defend him but soon discovers she cannot.
It doesn't end there. Soon Bundy flees to Florida, where he is suspected in several more gruesome murders. A boisterous televised trial follows, with Ted as its charming antihero. He commands the courtroom: riffing, frivolously objecting, firing his court-appointed attorney, lambasting the judge and prosecution. Efron deftly displays Bundy's hypermasculine confidence, which doubles as his weakness: his assumption that--of course--everyone will believe his plea of innocence, because he's smart enough to convince them. Even the judge (played with stoic authority by John Malkovich) admits to being impressed with Bundy's competence in representing himself. And because Berlinger puts us in the position of the charmed rather than the charmer, we're a little surprised when the guilty verdict comes.
Berlinger, a documentarian who--along with his late partner Bruce Sinofsky--delivered some of the best true-crime work that's ever been made, like Brother's Keeper and the Paradise Lost series, has dealt quite a bit with the notion of prejudice trumping evidence. The borderline-aboriginal family in Brother's Keeper finds it difficult to get a fair shake in court, as do the supposed Satan-worshiping West Memphis Three in Paradise Lost, even when the evidence seems to be in their favor. His much-maligned but underrated Blair Witch 2 spun out from the mockumentary format of the original to explore what happens when the footage doesn't seem to fit the fact.
Here Berlinger shows in disturbing detail how much of the public, including many women, took Bundy's side despite the evidence, possibly because he was handsome, affable, all the things that sociopaths learn to be in order to fool those around them. Even on death row, we see Bundy smiling, joking, still manipulating, still planning the next step. The evidence eventually won out in this case, but Berlinger seems to be saying that even in a seemingly clear-cut case such as Bundy's, it's an uphill slope.
No comments:
Post a Comment