Slow to get going but ultimately very winning in its understated humanity, Terri (2011, Azazel Jacobs) tracks a lonely, overweight high-school student's social progress as he gradually expands his circle of friends.
When we first meet the high-schooler, named Terri and played by likable newcomer Jacob Wysocki with nary a trace of pity-party pleading, his life is stuck in an unenviable cycle of going to school, performing household tasks for his mentally troubled uncle (The Office's Creed Bratton), and scarfing down meals consisting of toast topped with baked beans. Director Jacobs depicts Terri's routine existence with a vividly unglamorous verisimilitude, but in early scenes, he and writer Patrick Dewitt are unable to separate the necessary repetition of Terri's daily grind from the unnecessary repetition of a character study spinning its narrative wheels. You've seen one scene of Terri setting mouse traps in the attic for doddering Uncle James, you've seen 'em all.
The movie gains in interest at the point when Terri's weekly meetings with assistant principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who insists on the meetings in a bid to increase Terri's self-esteem, gain in character depth. Mr. Fitzgerald is initially viewed as a comical figure armed with feeble motivational phrases and tricks, but Dewitt and the masterful Reilly eventually reveal, with commendable subtlety, that underneath his optimistic bluster, Mr. Fitzgerald is a regular guy with problems like anyone else who is just trying to do his job to the best of his abilities. Reilly is perfectly cast in a role that draws upon both his vast comedic and dramatic gifts, and he and Wysocki play off of each other beautifully.
Wysocki also has real chemistry opposite Bridger Zadina and Olivia Crocicchia, who play two high-school peers of Terri's who warm up to him. Zadina's compulsively hair-pulling beanpole Chad bonds with Terri over their shared visits to Mr. Fitzgerald's office, while Crocicchia's Heather is a beauty downgraded to outcast status after suffering a sexually humiliating incident in home-ec class. Jacobs gets these three teens together for a marvelously observed climactic scene, boldly played out in near-real-time, in which they experiment with drugs and alcohol in Uncle James' shed. The substance ingestion leads to honest confessions, awkward stabs at intimacy, and bursts of drunken hostility, all captured by Jacobs and Dewitt with compassion enough to recognize that teenagers need nights like this to remind them that life is full of surprise and possibility; it's not just homework and social ostracism.
Another good scene follows, between Terri and Mr. Fitzgerald, that cements Terri as a sweet, small-scale hymn to friendship. Grade: B
There's no other way to put it--Tabloid (2011, Errol Morris) is a humdinger of a documentary. The story of gossip-rag magnet Joyce McKinney is packed with enough sordid twists and turns to satisfy viewers drawn in by the title's implicit promise of salacious shocks; it's impossible not to laugh in disbelief or react with an inner "oh no, she didn't!" at what's unearthed here (honestly, this is the rare movie where other theatre patrons surely wouldn't mind if you vocalize that "oh no, she didn't!" reaction). But what makes Tabloid even more of an accomplishment is how celebrated documentarian Morris (The Fog of War), a sharp cookie, seems to flatter the intelligent viewer's armchair analysis of McKinney's story one moment and then confound that analysis the next moment. It's clear that he doesn't want every audience member walking out of the theatre with the exact same interpretation of who McKinney is and how trustworthy her own account of her life story is, and that ambiguity is what makes Tabloid such an exhilarating puzzle to piece together.
When McKinney, an enabling pilot, and a tabloid reporter offer their accounts of the "manacled Mormon" story that first gained McKinney notoriety in the film's opening passages, I wrongfully felt I had a handle on what Morris is after here. The differing accounts of the "manacled Mormon" legend go like this: authorities and reporters believe that former beauty queen McKinney kidnapped her Mormon ex-boyfriend, chained him to a bed, and forced him to repeatedly have sex with her, while McKinney claims in on-camera interviews that she and the love of her life had a blissfully romantic weekend that involved her challenging the shame-related perception of sex that had been drilled into the ex-boyfriend's head by the Mormon church. At this point, I believed that Morris was subtextually drawing a savage parallel between the neuroses women attain when paraded around the beauty-pageant circuit like so much meat and the inhuman repression suffered by devout followers of unhealthily restrictive religious cults (Morris, always cinematic in his approach to the documentary form, slyly incorporates footage from an animated Mormon propaganda film).
And, well, that initial reading of the film is still a valid interpretation, but it started to feel like a reductive one when McKinney's story continued unspooling onscreen. McKinney's tale most certainly doesn't end with the "manacled Mormon" fiasco, and the more you learn about her after the details of that incident have been laid out, the more your opinion of her and what Morris' movie really is keep shifting.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that most people I discuss this film with in the near future will conclude simply that McKinney is utterly batshit--a self-mythologizing loon. Morris' sole weakness is his occasional tendency to condescendingly underline the possibility of McKinney's insanity; at one point, he cuts immediately to black after McKinney stumbles in pronouncing the easy-enough word "phenomenon." But, for the most part, Morris lets us make up our own minds about her. In her defense, I'll say two things: her claim that female-on-male rape still requires an erection on the victim's part seems to me indisputable, and when a certain event much later in her life once again attracts the attention of tabloid reporters (I'm so not saying anything more than that), she does adopt a pseudonym, indicating that she doesn't always seek the validation of mass-media attention.
Look, I still don't quite know what I think about McKinney overall, but that fits what I think is Morris' ultimate goal--to provide a character study that tantalizingly withholds crucial details, the better to satisfy masochists who love a good "objective truth is unknowable" cinematic narrative. Those who have seen the likes of Rashomon or (my personal favorite) Zodiac several times know exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes, walking out of a movie not having any of the answers is preferable to having only one. Grade: A-
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