Tabloid is one crazy documentary. Make that one of the craziest stories I have ever heard about, and the fact that it is real is even more disturbing. But here is the problem: I don’t care about any of it. I completely understand why Errol Morris (Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure) would want to make a documentary about Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen with an IQ of 168 who kidnapped her soul mate or rescued him from the brainwashing of the Mormon community. It depends whose story you believe.
McKinney fell in love with a young Mormon Missionary named Kirk. Her story is they fell in love and then one day he disappeared. With the help of a private detective, she finds him in another country and rescues him from the steps of a meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He willingly went with her or so she says. She saved him and they ran off to a cottage and made love for three days, but he was intimidated and felt threatened by the Mormons so he told them he was kidnapped and raped. Of course, her story makes her sound like the hero and the “bad guys” made her dream man turn on her out of fear. Then there is the other side of the story to where Kirk told the police he was held at gunpoint and kidnapped. At the cottage, he was seduced, tied-up and raped by her. She was arrested and charged, but she completely denied everything.
No matter which version you believe, it became a media frenzy in the British tabloids. She was the Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton of her day. And in all of this chaos, nude pictures of McKinney are found and posted. Her image goes from a beautiful beauty queen to a mad lover who abducted the man of her dreams and involved sex and bondage. The good girl next door who was a fool in love instantly became a sex-craved maniac. But McKinney wants to prove she is not insane and that her and Kirk were in love and, in her own mind, still are. Morris does not pick a side. He lets McKinney tell her side as well as interview the photographers and reporters who covered these events in 1977.
Tabloid sounds outrageous huh? Ridiculous perhaps? Well it is and that is part of its attraction yet also its downfall. At first, McKinney and her wild adventures are interesting and exciting, but the longer this documentary goes the more you lose interest because it’s gone too nutty. There is no feeling of a connection with her. The journey is such a roller coaster ride that by the end you just want to get off.
Morris uses McKinney to show us what tabloids can do to a person, for better or worse. But we already knew that. We live in a world where most of the news we hear is tabloid sleaze. Tabloid is not really about the tabloid business at all. Instead, it focuses on a woman who is crazy in one way or another, and you have to choose which parts you want to believe. Or you may do like I did and just quit caring all together. Once the film starts to focus on McKinney and dog cloning, I was done.
“Nature Boy” Brandon Vick is the resident film critic of the SoBros Network, and star of Brandon’s Box Office In Your Mouth. Follow him on Twitter@SirBrandonV and be sure to search #VicksFlicks for all of his latest movie reviews.
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