Tabloid

LITTLE ROCK — I don’t know why I’d never heard of the case of the “Manacled Mormon.”

It happened in 1977, when a pudgy 21-year-old American Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson was allegedly abducted from the steps of a Latter-day Saints meetinghouse in Surrey, England, by a fellow American, a 26-year-old former beauty queen named Joyce McKinney (and her shadowy henchman, a bloke named Keith May).

They took a blindfolded Anderson - allegedly at gunpoint - to a cottage in rural Devon, and chained him to a bed. Over the next three days, Anderson later told a court, McKinney forced him to repeatedly have sex with her.

“I was very upset,” he said.

Anderson eventually talked his captors into releasing him and went straight to the police. McKinney was arrested on kidnapping charges and at her bail hearing she said that Anderson, to whom she’d been engaged back in the States, had been a willing participant. She followed him to England to rescue him from the Mormons and that all the sex (and there was lots and lots of sex) was consensual.

“I loved him so much I would have skied naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he had asked me to,” McKinney said. But now she was through with Anderson because, “He don’t know what eternal love is.”

To say much more about the curiously engaging McKinney, the narcissist at the center of Errol Morris’ guilty pleasure documentary Tabloid, risks ruining some of the fun. Suffice it to say that she’s a genuinely bizarre character, a Southern belle Scheherazade who may not genuinely recognize borders between truth and fantasy. Whether you find any of her claims credible or not, you can’t help but be fascinated with the tales she spins.

Morris knows he has struck gold here, and most of his movie consists of McKinney animatedly talking about herself, and her picaresque life, in a Southern drawl that most movie critics would brand inauthentic if it came out of Sandra Bullock’smouth. She simply is a force of nature, a smooth-running kind of confabulator with enough self-awareness to make you wonder if she’s not actually running some kind of high concept art con on us.

Morris punctuates her story with graphics, titles, clips from old movies, some startling, vintage 16mm footage and cartoons drawn in the style of Jack T. Chick’s religious tracts that illustrate her stories. Morris also interviews two British journalists, Daily Express columnist Peter Tory and Daily Mirror photographer Kent Gavin, who covered McKinney’s kidnapping trial (and who come off as hissable villains).

One person we don’t hear from - understandably - is Anderson, who eventually moved back to Utah, married and started a family.

While it is possible, especially in the wake of the News of the World scandal, to see Tabloid as a critique of the press’ role in celebritizing exotic people, it seems clear that Morris - who, as usual in his films, is seen and not heard as his subjects address his patented “Interrotron” - is as guilty of exploiting McKinney as Fleet Street ever was. We’re drawn to her fantastic stories for the same reasons that readers of the Express and Mirror were drawn to the “Manacled Mormon.”

As Errol Morris films go - he won an Oscar for Fog of War, and 1988’s The Thin Blue Line helped to free a wrongfully convicted man from death row - Tabloid is fairly lightweight. But it’s nevertheless one of the most entertaining movies that will hit theaters this year.

89

Cast:

Documentary, with Kent Gavin, Joyce McKinney, Peter Tory

Director:

Errol Morris

Rating:

R, for sexual content and nudity

Running time:

88 minutes