Something much more sobering next with 2017’s unsettling doc Casting JonBenet, a uniquely told exploration of one of North America’s most infamous unsolved child-murder cases. I regret watching this one because, as a father of a little girl, this is a very difficult watch. What we know of this disquieting tale is that JonBenet Ramsay was a six-year-old child beauty queen who was found slain at her family’s Boulder, Colorado home at Christmastime 1996. The case caused uproar in the U.S. for months due to a long, handwritten ‘ransom note’ found in the house that some experts believed was written in the child’s mother’s handwriting and the fact that JonBenet was actually found strangled to death in the basement of the family house just seven hours after the parents reported her ‘missing’. Tragically, all this went down on Christmas Day and the story generated endless tabloid column inches as the child’s mother was herself a former beauty queen.
The film examines how this baffling case has generated countless theories over what happened on that dreadful Christmas day. Did the mum do it? The dad? Was it JonBenet’s nine-year-old brother? A burglar? A hired Santa Claus impersonator? It’s frustrating as director Kitty Green’s film poses many questions but answers none of them. What’s interesting about this one is in the way the story is told and examined. Described as a “conceptual exercise”, Jon Benet’s murder and the various interpretations of her story are discussed by actors who believe they’re auditioning for roles in a movie about the case. This is done to examine how people are still preoccupied with the case and how rumours and bias, prejudice and blanket news coverage can affect the way we view things that have nothing to do with us.
It’s an absorbing and original way to tell the story with the film showing absolutely zero original footage from the time of the murders or eyewitness testimony, just the recollections and opinions of various actors trying out for the roles of each main player involved in the case: the mother Patsy, father John, brother Burke, the local police chief, JonBenet herself and more. There are also some very short scenes of ‘re-enactments’ of what allegedly happened at the time, though nobody can really be sure. It’s a film about speculation and guesswork. The actors share their thoughts about what they think happened, who did it, why they feel that way and why Americans are still so fascinated with the case. The fact that they come up with so many conflicting theories is, I guess, the point of this riveting docudrama - in devastating cases of public interest like this one, we can be prone to be making these tragic stories in some way about ourselves.
It’s an elaborate case of ‘Chinese Whispers’, with these local Colorado thespians recounting their memories of the case as experienced through the prism of the sensationalist media and hearsay. This is all about perception and people projecting their own feelings and life experiences onto a story that they can’t possibly know the truth about. It’s fascinating to witness how some of these guys unconsciously make JonBenet’s story all about themselves. One man auditioning for the part of the Dad talks openly about how he once woke up next to the corpse of his girlfriend and how he was suspected of foul play. Another woman trying out for the Patsy role talks candidly about how three of her own children have sadly passed. One guy who actually attended JonBenet’s funeral in ‘96 frankly states how he’s sure that another guy at that funeral must have been the killer.
Green’s measured documentary also cleverly examines how actors can use their own life experiences to ‘get into character’ for a role but, in discussing those feelings, they can open up and inadvertently ‘open up’ and reveal their own prejudices and unconscious bias. Everyone has access to the same facts and evidence but still come up with their own, often crazy stories. It becomes obvious that there can be multiple different ‘truths’ depending on what angle you’re viewing a story from.
Unfortunately, this one is a bit of a bummer and not that Christmassy at all, though one suspect was a Santa impersonator who was in the Ramsey house that day. It’s bizarre to see these actors trying out for the Santa role while telling dark anecdotes that show their outlooks on life to be decidedly un-jolly. However, the most randomly memorable scene must surely belong to the one dude auditioning for the police chief part who offhandedly explains how in his day job he works as a ‘sex teacher’, casually discussing how he loves “breast torture, whipping, nipples, tits, doing breast bondage” while swinging his whips about. Ho ho ho?
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