Pros: Sympathy, open-mindedness, eloquence. Excellent acting, and graceful, understated directing. A powerful topic.
Cons: A sad and somewhat scary topic, too.
The Bottom Line: The death of millions is a statistic; the death of one is a novelty and freak show. Or, just occasionally, a chance to think, listen, feel, and learn.
It is not quite right to suggest that the Laramie Project is perhaps the finest documentary I’ve ever seen; not quite right, given that Laura Linney, Steve Buscemi, Christina Ricci, Janeane Garafolo, Dylan Baker, Frances Sternhagen, and a couple dozen other actors speak lines, and play parts, of people other than themselves. (Unusual documentary behavior, that.) It _is_ right, on the other hand, to note that Laura Linney, Steve Buscemi, Christina Ricci, Janeane Garafolo, Dylan Baker, and Frances Sternhagen have track records implying that a project featuring all of them, each taking relatively small paychecks, will be very darned worthwhile. That is all I knew of the Laramie Project the first time I chose to watch it; I did not even know what project the title referred to. Now I do; so if you like to have that sort of info before renting a movie, read on.
Laramie, Wyoming – a conservative Western college town of less than 30,000 people, in a part of the country the national media tends to glance down at through the windows of their jets – started to become famous on October 7, 1998, when the slightly-alive (but doomed) body of a college student named Matt Shepard was found in a corn field, tied to a fence and bloody. It was a brutal crime by any standards – he’d been severely beaten, then left hanging for more than 18 hours. The man who found him said the only parts of his face not covered by blood were the streaks where his tears had washed him clean: fine nightly-news gore.
But the true media sensation began when the killers, Laramie white boys named Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were identified, along with their defense. Matt Shepard was a young gay man; they claimed to have killed him in a blacked-out overreaction to being sexually approached by him. Eyewitnesses (most notably the bartender) refuted the story: Matt had been peacefully at the bar, friendly but hitting on no one, as was his custom. Aaron and Russell had pretended to be gay, enticed Matt into their car, driven him off, and pummeled him into slow, agonized oblivion.
The media’s massed assault on the town is portrayed in the Laramie Project, briefly and with understated power; it was, of course, sensationalized, abrupt, eager to mark Laramie out as a special place, eager to shout “How do you feel?”, and eager to then disappear to the next story. It was an insight of Laramie Project writer/director Moises Kaufman that the people of Laramie might need a lot of time and discussion to know the answer to “How do you feel?”, and that they might, therefore, have had a very difficult time moving on. So Kaufman asked help from a few fellow theater people (Laramie Project was his play before it was his movie), and came to Laramie after the national story was dead. He interviewed over 200 residents of Laramie in depth, seeking
(1) to build a play from their words and
(2) to learn how the town’s residents had come to see the event – and how they had come to see their town.
On his first night in town, he passed (and we see) a restaurant whose marquee, instead of saying ALL-U-CAN-EAT FISH FRY 6 TO 9 P.M., announced HATE IS NOT A LARAMIE VALUE: a hearteningly common view, he learns. But as a different Laramie resident insists, “Obviously, this _is_ the kind of town where these things happen, because it did happen”. As Kaufman explores the event and its aftermath, he brings us, not firm conclusions, but a respectfully varied picture of ordinary people coping with shock and notoriety.
It is part of this respect, I believe, that led Kaufman to use professional actors. Very few of us can act natural or impassioned on camera, even or perhaps especially when we’re too close to the subject matter. (Even his fellow interviewers Amanda Gronich and Greg Pierrotti were played by other actors, while Amanda and Greg themselves played townspeople.) By this decision, Kaufman allowed these ordinary people to have their words delivered with more power than they could have lent by themselves.
**********
Some of the interviews are with what Laramie had in the way of a gay community. Janeane Garafolo speaks the words of Professor Catherine Connolly, the first “out” lesbian at U. of Wyoming: she came out in her job interview, as recent as 1992, when she was asked “and what does your husband do?”. She tells of being hired and almost at once receiving a phone call from a stranger whose first words were “Is it true that you’re a lesbian?”. We feel her nervousness as she answers yes; she then voice-acts the caller’s “Oh, that’s wonderful”, and the request to meet Connolly right away.
Connolly would remain the most notable lesbian in Laramie; it is she who, in the wake of the Shepard killing, admits to an “irrational fear … whenever a truck turns around on my street, I’m afraid the driver is doubling back to get me”. I’ve never understood the point of Hate Crime legislation until this movie, and still don’t know if I support it: isn’t a murder a murder? But of course, that climate of fear – however irrational – is part of what a focused anti-gay killing seeks.
On the other hand, a gay male professor who’d been at the college for decades tells us of watching, out his window, a march by the campus’s gay-les-bi coalition to show outrage at the Shepard killing. His voice fills with wonderment as he tells of the small first row of marchers being followed by steadily growing ranks of townspeople. “I’m happy I got to live to see that moment”, he says, and it’s important … important even though Matt, of course, did _not_ live to see. We watch a brief, quiet simulation of that rally: we see actors we’ve met speaking the words of townspeople pour onto the streets, in those townspeople’s places. Perhaps it shouldn’t work or be moving – but for my wife and me, at least, it is.
The bulk of the non-gay townspeople we meet want to dissociate themselves from the hate that made the killing. A very grizzled and ill-shaven Steve Buscemi, as limo driver Doc O’Conner, is someone we might stereotype as having been startled by his first time driving Matt: he recalls Matt saying “I want you to know three things. One, call me Matt, not Matthew or Mr. Shepard. Two, I’m gay. Three, you’ll be taking me to a gay bar. Is that something you’ll be okay with?”. But no, O’Conner informed Kaufman that of course he had no problem, that no one really cares. “Course, you have to understand, there are no gay bars in Laramie – or in Wyoming. I was driving him to Fort Collins, Colorado”.
But not everyone can buy the separation of Aaron and Russell from the town that birthed and raised them. A (non-gay) acting major recalls his discovery of a scene in Angels in America that he knew he wanted to use in his upcoming Dramatic Interpretation competition. He grins ingratiatingly: “You understand, it was mostly selfish. I thought it was a killer scene, and I thought I could win with it”. But his parents promised him that they would refuse to attend the competition if he insisted on playing that homosexual character in that scene of that play.
He did the scene anyway. With it, he won first place in the competition, and gets dreamy in telling of his joy in victory. The interviewer breaks the reverie: “So did your parents come?”. “No”, says the actor – and they would complain again when, in the wake of Shepard’s death, the U. of Wyoming’s theater group chose Angels in America as their play, and cast him as lead. “Homosexuality is wrong!”, they argued, and he editorializes for the interviewer: “You understand, I’d just played the killer of a child in MacBeth. I’d killed McDuff and a couple of other people, and they never had a problem with that”.
(I'm reminded of Michael Moore discussing the fallout from his first movie Roger and Me. There’s a scene in that movie where a woman kills a bunny rabbit, to sell as meat: Moore has received hundreds, if not thousands, of complaints about including such a vicious and violent scene. One scene prior, he showed the murder of a black man; he received exactly zero complaints about that.)
**********
As I alluded to earlier, the playwright and other interviewers are, themselves, characters. This isn’t Adaptation or anything like it, not The Story Of The Making Of the Laramie Project: the interviewer reaction shots, and discussions among themselves, are a very small part of the movie, but a useful one. For three of them are, themselves, gay and lesbian, and they're right to bring that into the open.
The result, which they portray, is that not every interviewee could meet them on equal terms. Professor Connolly, or the Angels in America actor, or the bartender/ crime witness Matt Galloway: they’re comfortable with the interviews, expansive and open. Laura Linney portrays townsperson Sherry Johnson as hunched and uncomfortable, though; she’s permitted to state her case (“why is _this_ death special? We lost an officer of the police force that very same day, run over by an ancient driver, and he was a brief item on page 17A and then disappeared. One of our own boys”), but she knows her interviewer won’t be thrilled to hear it.
Father Roger Schmit didn’t want to meet them at all; as played by Tom Bower, we see him carefully phrasing his hope that, in his final moments, Matt was considering carefully his choices in life, and the words of Jesus our lord. Bower’s Schmit shows his awareness that he’ll be cast as the bad guy, even as the interviewer (played by Clea Duvall) nods and thanks him for his time; and indeed, she’ll rush to Kaufman and cry “I let him talk to me that way! I let him, and I didn’t say anything back”.
For the filmmakers admit that they are not impartial – not on quite everything. Yes, you might reach a conclusion about Laramie from the movie, and another viewer might use the same words and scenes to reach an opposite one; yes, you might find the film optimistic, and another might find it pessimistic. Yes, opinions are weighed evenly when it comes to the death penalty, or the right and wrong times for forgiveness. But the filmmakers do not take one thing as an open question: values that promote love _are_ better than values that promote unprovoked hate. Their minds are open, but not so far that their consciences fall out.
Thus people they disagree with can make points that have, in their favor, the sound of reason. “I have nothing at all against gay people”, one of the town’s older residents says, “as long as they don’t define themselves by it. As long as being gay isn’t the central thing about them”. The words scan; the logic is easy to follow; indeed, if they mean self-definition by gay _acts_, it’s a good summary of why I find David Sedaris’s writing as tiring as it is funny. (I don’t want to know the sex lives of straight essayists in such detail either.)
But you know … people don’t fully choose their definitions. Matt Shepard didn’t, obviously, fat lot of good it did him (as the bartender, played by Dawson’s Creek’s Joshua Jackson, wryly pointed out, “he didn’t hit on people; he didn’t even hit on _me_”). Maybe you think a gay playwright is self-defining, too much, by asking 200+ people to talk about Matt Shepard. But I ask you: why didn’t a straight playwright get there first?
In October 1998, 21 Year-old Matthew Shepard Was Found Savagely, Beaten, Tied To A Fence And Left To Die In Laramie, Wyoming., The Portrait Of A Town ...More at HotMovieSale.com
Product DetailsOriginal Title:The Laramie ProjectActors: Christina Ricci - Dylan Baker - er Phoenix - Kevin Aviance - Laura Linney - Steve BuscemiCon...More at iNetVideo.com
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