Kitty Green (2017)
Before The Assistant (2019), her dramatic feature debut, Kitty Green made three documentaries, culminating in this one. How you receive Casting JonBenet depends on, inter alia, how much you know in advance about the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, in Boulder, Colorado on Christmas night 1996. The case has become an enduring international cause célèbre – enduring largely because the murder officially remains unsolved – and Green, who is Australian, assumes prior knowledge of the essential details. Either I never knew or I’d forgotten most of them. I was aware the victim was a child beauty queen: I carried an image in my head of a doll-like figure in a huge blonde wig and glittery pageant costume. I had the idea that a bogus abduction and ransom demand were involved, and that no one had been convicted of the killing. But that’s about all. I gleaned what else I now know about the case – including theories about who killed the little girl – from Green’s numerous talking heads.
Casting JonBenet is a nifty idea. Green conducts auditions for roles in a reconstruction of the events of Christmas 1996. The people auditioning are also invited to talk about JonBenét’s murder and about themselves. They’re a motley crew of professional and non-professional actors, variously employed. Thanks to a combination of menacing aspect and the nature of his part-time work, one of the least forgettable is a self-described ‘sex educator’, who attempts to demonstrate to the camera how to use a flogging whip (comically, and fortunately, without anyone on the receiving end). What unites these people is that they all live in or around Boulder. In other words, as well as serving an ulterior motive in relation to the proposed reenactment, they’re a means of illustrating the diverse memories and myths about the murder that have built up in the local community.
These aspiring cast members assert the guilt or innocence of family members who’ve been suspected of killing JonBenét – her mother Patsy, father John, elder brother Burke – and discuss the possibility that the culprit was an intruder in the family home. They opine on the authorship of the ludicrously lengthy ransom ‘note’ police found on the premises (it ran to several pages) and rumours about the Ramsey parents’ involvement in a paedophile ring. Some interviewees have their own barmy theories. One woman claims a sixth sense about the crime in more ways than one: she sees it as significant that JonBenét died at the age of six, in 1996, perhaps in the early hours of December 26th (sic!) Others relate what happened to their own traumatic experiences of the death of a child, the murder of a sibling, a cancer diagnosis. (Patsy Ramsey overcame cancer years before, and died of the disease a decade after, her daughter’s murder.)
For this viewer, eager to know more about the case and fascinated by acting, the documentary’s first half is intriguing – enough to subdue, if not expel, suspicion that this is at heart an exploitation film. You naturally start assessing the potential actors. One young boy is vividly, naturally eccentric as he describes to the interviewer (never seen or heard) a day he spent auditioning for a mattress commercial: I was glad to see him briefly turn up as Burke Ramsey in a later scene. The layers of pretence involved in the spectacle of would-be JonBenéts – made up and bewigged, in gruesome pageant uniform – are queasy but compelling. An actor called Dixon White is memorably creepy reading for the role of John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to the murder years after it was committed. But, by the time another actor explains his soul-searching before deciding to audition for John Ramsey, the benefit of the doubt has worn very thin. By the end of Casting JonBenet, you feel that Kitty Green has been doubly exploitative – of a murdered child and her family, and of some of the living people she’s put on camera, albeit they had a choice in the matter denied to the Ramseys.
As in Robert Greene’s nearly contemporary Kate Plays Christine (2016), the proposed dramatisation of real-life events that is the film’s launch pad gradually recedes from prominence. A difference lies in the extent of clear complicity between the film-maker and the actor(s) involved. In Kate Plays Christine you come to see that Kate Lyn Sheil, who is researching the life of the late TV news journalist Christine Chubbuck in preparation for playing her, knows what Greene has in mind. In Casting JonBenet you increasingly wonder quite how the director sold the project to prospective participants. Did Kitty Green give them an idea of what, if anything, her narrative of the crime would suggest actually happened? Were they told in advance that the reconstruction for which they were auditioning would comprise only a minor part, in terms of both screen time and impact, of the eventual film? What few reconstruction scenes there are amount to incidents peripheral to the murder. That pleasant middle-aged man who searched his conscience before going for the part of John Ramsey says he decided that, by getting involved, he ‘might actually do some good’. It’s impossible to see from the end result what he thought that good might be.
Although this is obscured for a while by one’s interest in finding out key facts of the case and in the auditions, Kitty Green, from an early stage, does little to conceal her sly, stylish priorities. The women in the running for Patsy Ramsey are all dressed in red, except for one in blue; the latter, also uniquely, wears the pearl necklace that, she explains, was the original’s hallmark accoutrement. (This woman does resemble several of the others, though, in looking too old for Patsy, who had her fortieth birthday a few days after JonBenét’s death. John Ramsey, who is still alive, was thirteen years his wife’s senior.) JonBenét Ramsey was strangled to death after being bashed on the head. Green reaches her antic point of no return with an insert that follows discussion among her interviewees as to whether nine-year-old Burke would have been physically capable of inflicting on his sister the cranial damage she suffered. By way of analogy, Green shows a succession of small boys, in goggles and rainwear, who use a torch to try and smash open a watermelon. The last of these kids, when he succeeds in doing so, instinctively eats a bit of the fruit – a detail whose charm doesn’t come close to reducing the ugliness of the sequence’s conception. In the finale to Casting JonBenet red-clad Patsys swarm onto a constructed set of the Ramsey home. The composition is nothing if not visually rhythmical, tonally striking. As such, and as Kitty Green’s film as a whole turns out to be, it’s also morally bankrupt.
7 February 2021
