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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
NBC's "The Matthew Shepard Story" and HBO's "Con Man" try to capture the tragic lives of two very different college students using tried-and-true TV formulas.
Mar 14, 2002 | I once had a job interview with a network movie-of-the-week producer who informed me, within seconds of my walking in the door, that the only reason he'd called me in was because we'd attended the same university. Did I enjoy it there? Oh, did I? Because he hated it deeply, and what, by the way, did movies of the week mean to me? Feeling like someone who had just walked into that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to join any club that will take me, I took a long pause before trying to put what few feelings I had on the subject into words. Would I offend him by acknowledging what I always assumed was the intentional prurience and sensationalism of the average ripped-from-the-headlines dramatization, wink, wink? Would I come across as disingenuous or naive or depressingly idealistic if I didn't? It was a gamble either way. I went with the issue-of-the-week angle and he kicked me out of his office.
I was reminded of my employer manqué upon receiving copies of two headline-inspired true stories set to air in the coming week, although only one of them, NBC's "The Matthew Shepard Story," which airs Saturday, March 16, at 9 p.m. (8 Central), actually qualifies as part of the genre. Produced by Goldie Hawn, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and written with the cooperation of Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, "The Matthew Shepard Story" stars Shane Meier as Matthew and Stockard Channing and Sam Waterston as his parents, Judy and Dennis. The story begins with the now-legendary murder of Shepard, an openly gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Spottiswoode depicts the killing as an almost balletic experience, with great dragon yawns on the soundtrack accompanying every blow. Then the film skips a year and ends with Judy and Dennis' decision not to pursue the death penalty for Matthew's assailant, Aaron McKinney, so that he may thank Matthew for his life every day.
In Channing and Waterston's capable but perhaps overly efficient hands, Judy and Dennis Shepard don't exude the grieving-parent vibe so much as they do the crusading-nonprofit-worker vibe. This is too bad, because Shepard's story is much sadder than the format allows you to feel. In another ill-advised move, Matthew's life story is reenacted based on the somewhat distant, somewhat sparse and often secondhand recollections of his parents, whose prism, it stands to reason, is probably not free of smudges. These scenes from Matthew's life -- he jerks away when a Laramie girl tries to kiss him after a dance; he flirts with a swarthy sophomore at his cosmopolitan Swiss boarding school; he enters the university, where he joins a gay student group and starts throwing big parties for his friends, making Judy a little uncomfortable -- are interspersed between moody, tense vignettes of Sam and Judy as they struggle to write a victim's statement that will get Aaron McKinney the death sentence, before they experience a change of heart.
If there is anything new to be said about hate crimes, grieving families or the age-old question, "How could this happen here?" it's not addressed in "The Matthew Shepard Story." Those are, however, precisely the questions behind HBO's recent "The Laramie Project," based on the Moisés Kaufman play in which a troupe of New York actors is deployed to Laramie to interview its residents and then interpret them verbatim, Anna Deavere Smith/Eve Ensler style. (In the film version, which premiered a week earlier than originally intended after NBC scheduled its drama against it, both the New York actors and the Laramie residents are portrayed by Christina Ricci, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Buscemi and other celebrities.
But the NBC film does teach us interesting things about Matthew himself. He felt relatively comfortable coming out to his understanding parents while still in high school, he appeared to have the support of friends and he arrived at college completely out of the closet. In fact, you can't help feeling that Matthew's decision to attend the University of Wyoming -- portrayed here as motivated by a brutal attack he suffered while on a class trip to Morocco, and which may cause you to yell out, "No! For God's sake! Not Wyoming!" horror movie-style -- was arrived at in part because, despite some bad experiences, Matthew felt safe and comfortable with who he was.
