Tabloid Review
By David Kempler
You Can Read It In The Sunday Papers
The master, Errol Morris, is back, and his focus this time around is a central character who operates on the periphery of sanity. Anyone surprised by this has never seen an Errol Morris production. Morris has been proving for years that truth makes fiction seem like a piker when it comes to weirdness.
Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, is the star of this craziness and what she did or didn't do is the focus of "Tabloid". Some of what happened is not in dispute. McKinney met a young man in Utah who was a Mormon. Within a day they were madly in love and planning to wed. Within two days they were selecting their children's names. This was really true love. The plan went awry on the third day when Joyce could not find her beloved Kirk.
Most young ladies would have probably cried for a while and picked themselves up or perhaps they would have moved on and thought that Kirk was a nutjob. But Joyce McKinney is no average young lady. She hired a private detective to track Kirk down. Turns out that Kirk had been taken by his Mormon brethren to London to begin his missionary work. Again, this might have frightened some off, but Joyce instead hired a pilot and a bodyguard and headed to London to ‘rescue' Kirk. This is the point where opinions of what happened next go in different directions.
In her interview with Morris, she maintains that she was there to rescue him, because she knew that they were meant to be together. Mostly everyone else interviewed by Morris tells it with a different spin. They maintain that she abducted him with chloroform and raped him repeatedly. Then it gets really weird, including what Joyce goes through many years later that thrust her back into the spotlight of the media.
Morris does a great job of slapping us back and forth between gasping at outrageousness and laughing at the craziness in front of us. My only complaint with "Tabloid" is the camera work. In an attempt to jar us and portray the tabloids of England, it all gets a bit too jumpy for my tastes. But Morris is truly an elite director and an elite locator of the bizarre, so "Tabloid" is required viewing to those of us that are best satisfied by the fringes of human beings. Since, admitedly or not, we all love the weird, you know you really should make sure to see it.
