DAN WEBSTER:
Though he initially had problems being accepted by the traditional documentary-making community, Errol Morris eventually became one of the most influential documentarians of the 20th century. His first film, 1978’s Gates of Heaven, attracted raves among critics. In the late Roger Ebert’s four-star review, which he published in 1997 after claiming to have seen the film some 30 times, he described it as being: “in a category by itself, unclassifiable, provocative, tantalizing.”
“When I put it on my list of the 10 greatest films ever made, I was not joking,” Ebert wrote. “This 85-minute film about pet cemeteries has given me more to think about over the past 20 years than most of the other films I’ve seen.”
Yet to the Motion Picture Academy, the film didn’t meet its Oscar standards. And neither did the film that brought Morris his first real success, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, Morris’ study of a man who was wrongly convicted of murder—and who, at least in part because of the film, was eventually exonerated.
Although The Thin Blue Line won a dozen awards across the country—including from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics—the MPA’s documentary branch remained unconvinced, aghast at Morris’ use of scene re-creations and other non-traditional techniques. It wasn’t until 2004 that Morris finally earned a Best Documentary Feature nomination. And the film that was nominated, The Fog of War, ended up winning Oscar gold. It remains the only one of the two dozen feature films that Morris has directed or executive-produced to be so honored.
Not that any of this stopped Morris, who at the age of 77 remains active. His latest film, titled CHAOS: The Manson Murders, premiered on Netflix March 7th. Based on the nonfiction book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, written by the journalist Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, Morris’ film focuses on Manson, his so-called family and the murders that a number of them committed—namely of the movie star Sharon Tate and four others, then the next night of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
The horror of these murders, amplified by the death of the eight-and-a-half-month pregnant Tate and the antics that Manson and his women followers put on during the trial, made headlines around the world. The crimes and subsequent trials inspired numerous newspaper stories, magazine articles, television programs, feature films (one by Quentin Tarantino) and books.
One of the most famous books was written by Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Manson. Titled Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, the book is central to Morris’ documentary. And that’s because it is characterized by the journalist O’Neill as a cover-up for what really went on.
To O’Neill, who comes across as a guy who considers what he thinks to be more important than what he can prove, Bugliosi was more concerned with becoming a best-selling author than in getting to the real heart of the matter. While no one can question what happened to Tate and the others, nor that Manson was able to coerce his family to do his bidding, O’Neill goes not just a step but a couple of kilometers further: He attempts to tie Manson to a CIA program seeking to develop a Manchurian Candidate-type of mind control.
Problem is, despite uncovering secret documents, conducting numerous interviews and citing references to an actual CIA program called MKUltra, O’Neill can’t quite tie it all together—except to point out that Manson in 1967 was hanging out at a free medical clinic in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district at roughly the same time that a psychiatrist named Lewis “Jolly” West, an MKUltra disciple, was seeking people to participate in LSD experiments.
This is the empty heart of Morris’ film, which fills in the rest of its 95-minute running time using a variety of his trademark stylisms to regurgitate Manson’s failed career as a musician and going over the brutal nature of the murders.
In the end, CHAOS: The Manson Murders is likely to appeal to anyone who is obsessed with the lingering, haunting nature of the Tate/LaBianca killings. But unlike other Morris documentary features, the best ones being those that reveal some sense of actual truth, this one is little more than an intriguing delving into a place that Lewis Carroll’s Alice was tempted to explore: a rabbit hole populated by a world full of burning questions but no real answers.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
——
Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.