The Imposter
Bart Layton (2012)
There’s a scene in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley in which Tom Ripley, having murdered Dickie Greenleaf and assumed his victim’s identity (at least when it suits), has to present documentary proof of who he is. His papers include Dickie’s passport, which still contains the dead man’s photograph. No one is likely to mistake Matt Damon for Jude Law so on one level the acceptance of the credentials Tom passes through the guichet to an official is implausible. The scene works, though, as a demonstration of mind over matter: you believe that Tom convinces the customs man by an act of will. Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter tells the story of how Nicholas Barclay, a thirteen-year-old who disappeared in San Antonio, Texas in 1994, turned up in Spain three years later – by which time the blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenager had metamorphosed into a young man with brown eyes and a French accent. The new Nicholas, gratefully accepted by his family as the genuine article, was Frédéric Bourdin, twenty-three at the time and a serial imposter: at this stage in his career Bourdin had pretended to be numerous missing teenagers and was wanted by Interpol. I looked forward to seeing The Imposter to find out more about how Nicholas Barclay’s mother, brother, sister and brother-in-law were able to convince themselves (as I assumed they had convinced themselves) that Nicholas was who he claimed to be, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. I wondered if this was another case, like the sequence in Mr Ripley, of wanting something enough to persuade yourself and others that it’s true.
The Imposter turns out to be less interesting than it should be. The core of the material Bart Layton has put together comprises interviews with Bourdin, with Nicholas Barclay’s surviving family and with professionals involved in the case – notably a policewoman and a private detective. Layton supplements these with reconstructions of the scenes the interviewees describe. For a while, I wondered if he was doing this to acknowledge and even emphasise the idea that – at this distance in time and in the light of theories that have grown up around the case – it’s impossible not only to know what happened to Nicholas Barclay but also for those principally affected by or involved in his disappearance and ‘reappearance’ to behave naturally or talk truthfully in the presence of a camera. By the end of The Imposter, I was inclined to think there was a less sophisticated explanation for the reconstructions: a lack of confidence on the director’s part that his talking heads were enough to sustain the film. As it happens, none of these people is likeable. A more serious problem is that all of them emit, to varying degrees, an awareness of being characters in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story. If Frédéric Bourdin had any personal charm there would be some tension between that and the audience’s knowing they can’t believe a word he says and that he’s done shocking things; since he’s charmless, he’s tediously dislikeable. Now married with three children of his own, Bourdin suggests here, and has said in other interviews, that his way of life is an expression of a search for affection and attention that he never received as a child. Even if this is so, it’s such an obvious psychological explanation that you feel he’s making use of it because it’s plausible rather than because it’s true.
Nicholas Barclay’s family may have other reasons for being less than honest with Layton. Special Agent Nancy Fisher, who has a school prefect’s censoriousness, and the voluble private detective Charlie Parker are among those who think that the boy’s mother, the remarkably named Beverley Dollarhide (by some way the most compelling camera subject in The Imposter), and his now deceased elder brother Jason (who took a fatal drugs overdose), killed Nicholas and disposed of his body. It came as a surprise to me when, two thirds of the way through, Layton’s focus switched to this possibility. If you know anything about the case, however, it’s obvious the disappearance isn’t going to be solved or members of the family prosecuted. (If this had actually happened it would obviously feature more in the promotion of the filn and what’s being written about it.) The private detective is convinced he knows where the body is – in a corner of the back garden of the house where Nicholas lived at the time of his disappearance. Parker gets excited as he approaches the property for the moment of truth: it’s as if he wants the film to end the way that a fictional mystery would. He gets the eager-to-help new owner of the place to start digging up his lawn but the man’s spadework reveals nothing more than a yawning hole in the ground. At one point, Nicholas’s sister Carey reasonably asks why, if his family had done away with the boy, they would have reopened the case by welcoming Frédéric Bourdin into their lives. You wonder why, if they have anything to hide, they agreed to be interviewed by Bart Layton. But you wonder too if the answer is that they’ve grown so used to, even become dependent on, media interest this is now just the natural thing to do.
30 August 2012