In an age when news stories come so hard on each other’s heels, it may be hard to remember that the 1990’s there were several unsolved homicide cases that dominated the public imagination for years. The most famous, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, culminated in the trial and acquittal of her ex-husband O.J. Simpson and recently received documentary treatment, playing a part in the 7 hour, Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America. Now comes a documentary about the second most famous murder, that of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. Casting JonBenet eschews the broad historical investigation of Made in America in favor of a more meditative approach that explores the lingering cultural memory of the Ramsey case.
Casting JonBenet bears more than a passing resemblance to a film from last year’s True/False, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine (though of course, given the long production schedules for documentaries, this is most likely not a matter of influence, but coincidence). Both films deal with actors trying to get into character for a difficult role, ostensibly as a part of a fiction film. Where Greene’s film burrowed deep into the psyche of one actress and her personal struggles, though, Casting JonBenet goes broad, following multiple actors and actresses as they suss out the nuances of various characters involved in the Ramsey case. If Kate Plays Christine focuses on psychology, director Kitty Green here goes for sociology, examining the shockwaves of Ramsey’s murder in her community.
Though the talking head segments that comprise most of the film begin as audition spiels, they quickly morph into more personal statements. All of the actors involved are local to Colorado, and they all have some connection to Ramsey’s murder, be it a literal connection or merely a resonance in their own life that makes the case still reverberate in their minds. And each, of course, has a theory about who did – or didn’t – kill JonBenet. There’s some attempt at social commentary here, as when several of the women audition to play Patsy Ramsey, the mother, point out the sexism directed towards her during the investigation, but for the most part these ramblings come across as more private. During times of stress everyone clings to some interpretation of events, and Casting JonBenet astutely picks up on the bizarre theories that attend cases as ambiguous as this one.
Casting JonBenet less successfully tries to integrate fact and fiction by including multiple reenactments of events surrounding the film, footage that presumably exists within the (imaginary) biopic being made. Some of these reenactments work well, but others feel tacked on and at odds with the rest of the film. They lack the mysterious repetitive quality of their obvious reference point, the reenactments from Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, and on the whole they give an air of slickness to the film that rubs the wrong way against the rawness of many of the interviews.
Sometimes there’s wheat mixed in with the chaff though, as the end of the film demonstrates. The final five minutes act as a sort of coda, where the different actors and actresses all act out the same snippets from the night of JonBenet’s murder, played in a loop with a throbbing, emotional piano accompaniment. This all feels quite hoaky, until the final minute and a half or so, when all the different Patsies and Johns and JonBenets converge onscreen, a cacophony of images. It’s a transcendent picture of the multiplicity of meanings inherent in cultural memory.
