HBO’s ‘Mind Over Murder’: TV Review

Making a documentary, the process of being the subject of a documentary, has long been acting therapy, the camera acting as a sort of therapist/priest/judge hybrid.

An interesting thread on this topic in recent years has been the emergence of performance therapy as a documentary. Roberto Verde (the procession, Bisby’17 s Katie plays Cristina) and Joshua Oppenheimer (the act of murder s a look of silence) are among the leading figures in this subgenre, in which filmmakers observe or sometimes organize artistic exercises to help people deal with psychological wounds and possibly achieve catharsis, rather than simply filming themselves over psychological wounds.

The transfer from form to duration of the documentary series is on HBO mind to kill Directed by Nanfu Wang (nation of a child). You could absolutely make a full-length documentary exclusively about six people who were tried and later convicted of murdering a Nebraska widow in 1985. lie about murder Coming close to justifying its extended six-hour runtime, it also centers on a community theater show about a horrific situation, a play that aims to bring the city back into a difficult and painful past. The first side of a documentary is sometimes repeated and the second side is insufficient, but mind to kill It is still provocative, contrary to the classification of mere hero/villain/victim.

In 1985, 68-year-old Helen Wilson was raped and murdered in Beatrice, Nebraska. He followed instructions but was not arrested for several years. Six people were arrested a few years later. There was no evidence linking them to the crime. There was almost no evidence linking them. But five of them confessed, and the sixth was judged largely on those connections. More than a decade later, the DNA evidence pointed to a completely different asesino and led to the justification of what the averages llamaron Beatrice Six, because the averages are vacant and not in an injustice against another, Central Park Five, by the way. , it doesn’t matter. how different the situations are.

What really happened to Helen Wilson? What happened during the police investigation of the crime? What did Joseph White, Thomas Winslow, Ada Joan Taylor, Debra Shelden, James Dean and Katie Gonzalez have to do with it, and why did they admit it if they had nothing to do with the crime? These are the issues the Wilson family, represented here by some of their grandchildren, have been grappling with with local police and the city at large.

Enter the Community Actors Theater, directed by Cecilia Rubino and the play Gage District, NE, Compiled from court records and interrogations. There will be three nights of production. Gage District, NE Offer a cure if it destroys a fragile city?

Wang’s important documentary about a general legal disaster is solid. In the presence of this group of Wilson’s grandchildren, Wang holds the real victim in the face of the case, never losing awareness that wherever something bad has happened here, there are still grieving family members whose closure was often an afterthought. .

At the same time, “sad relatives” cannot compete when it comes to onscreen drama, plotting to blame the railroad. Wang, frankly, is four of the six justified figures on camera, which keeps him a constant mystery, even if “Story” spoils the end of the story for someone at Google. Wang shares the twists of “huh?!?” cliffhangers episode episode. I’ll leave the most annoying and unrecognizable details to play in the series. Suffice to say, it’s a little disappointing that the series doesn’t feature the worst culprits and the biggest thoughts on systemic injustices: repressed memories, treatment of the mentally ill, etc. – It has soft pedals. But there are plenty of participating figures who still claim their police work was healthy to shed the most serene blood.

There is a lot of contextualization and recontextualization about recorded or recorded confessions and interrogations, which means mind to kill It tells the same often graphic stories without endless results. This is where I wish Wang had been more aggressive in structuring and developing the play, in the selection and rehearsal process, and especially in positioning the actors in the community they care about.

for me is where mind to kill The most fascinating, like when an actor who plays a detective turned florist, Bert, meets the man he plays and tries to help him with his manners and motivation. Bart is often the main character in the documentary, or at least one of the people with whom Wang tries to carve a character arc through controversy, like a very meta-only showing of a rough part of a documentary. It is neither enough nor enough to follow the specific connections that actors have in society and, consequently, the tragedy they portray.

The idea that art can force you to consider what a steady, live, stable crisis in history might deny is so strong that I wish art didn’t stay in a five or ten minute episode throughout the series. . When the staging is finally completed and we are seeing certain results, that’s when mind to kill Finally, he avoids his most elemental true criminal trap. and when lie about murderr finds a deeper and more difficult approach than verbal arrest and justification, addressing the larger questions of what recovery from all adversity looks like in this case and how flawed the idea of ​​recovery can be.

ONE thin blue line This one Stairs This one TV Series This one hexWe have seen many examples of the role documentaries can play in achieving justice. mind to kill How he is too late to the party and may take too long a break to contribute to this discussion, when studying his role in documentaries is equally significant for solace.