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Errol Morris Has Been Sucked Into the Gaping Maw of True Crime
The documentarian may have been pivotal to creating the language of true crime, but he’s not immune to streaming bloat.
O’Neill doesn’t believe the narrative created during the trial and laid out in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best-selling Helter Skelter that Charles Manson was hoping to incite a race war when he sent his followers to kill Sharon Tate and the other residents of the house in which she was staying, and the next day to do the same to Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Watching Chaos: The Manson Murders, you get the feeling that Morris would have liked to make O’Neill that focus from the start, to structure the movie around him in the way he did Fred A. Leuchter in Mr. Death and Joyce McKinney in Tabloid, with Beausoleil and Kay’s interviews as contrast. It’s a funny, queasy legacy for a milestone film that had a lot more on its mind than much of the formulaic and frequently slapdash content that now crowds streaming services, many of which rely on such an established set of storytelling tics that a wry documentary at Sundance, The Zodiac Killer Project, riffed on and criticized them this year.
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