|
|
GIRL IN THE PICTURE
Director: Skye Borgman MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:41 Release Date: 7/6/22 (Netflix) |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2022 The assorted twists and turns of a series of crimes are the focal point of the true-crime documentary Girl in the Picture. On a human level, this is a tale of misery, tragedy, and pain that seems almost too much to bear. Director Skye Borgman can almost be forgiven for trying to keep some sense of objective distance to this material, as the narrative disassembles the mystery of a murdered woman and her uncertain past in the same chronological order that police, friends, and at least one journalist did over the course of several decades. The winding path of that investigation is clearly depicted here, if with an unfortunate undercurrent of sensationalism in the way Borgman constructs and presents the real-life timeline. The people involved—from the victims, whose fates are sometimes hidden by the narrative's structure in an attempt to shock, to their friends and families—aren't nearly as important as the number of horrific surprises this real-life tale of kidnapping and murder has in store. By the end, we understand exactly what happened, when it all occurred, and how utterly horrifying the entire tale is. That, sadly, seems to be the only goal in this movie. It all begins with the apparent hit-and-run death of a woman known as Tonya Hughes on a highway outside Oklahoma City in 1990. Some of the victim's few friends and co-workers at a strip club where she danced (The occasional flashes of half-naked women during unnecessary re-creations feels a bit disingenuous, considering the nature of some of the crimes that are revealed later) suspect foul play. Specifically, they're convinced Clarence Hughes, the man they knew as the woman's husband, killed her. Some years later, after nothing comes of the investigation, the husband abducts the dead woman's son, who had been living with a foster family (Their story is particularly upsetting, even with the focus of their interviews on the husband's behavior up until the kidnapping), at gunpoint from school. A nationwide manhunt ensues. From there, this narrative moves both forward—as the search for the husband, who was actually someone else entirely to the dead woman, continues—and backward—as the victim's life in various places with that same man, under a different name and with a very different relationship to her—in time. In the present day, Borgman conducts interviews with people who knew Hughes or, as she was known before her life in Oklahoma, Sharon Marshall, as well as local police official and the FBI agent in charge of the investigating boy's kidnapping. They're all business for the most part. That FBI agent explains his strategy for looking for the abductor and suspected murderer—Hughes or Marshall or the many other aliases by which he went over the course of his life. In the past timeline, we learns that the dead woman, presumed to be and legally his wife, was his daughter. Borgman interviews some of the woman's classmates from high school, who offer vague sentiments about how kind she was to everyone, although the most detailed description comes from one classmate who, having spent the night at the Marshalls house, witnessed her friend being raped by the man she assumed was the girl's father. Again, the crimes and the sheer awfulness of them are front and center in the movie's mind. It's not until the twisting and twisted history of that man is more or less fully revealed that Borgman somewhat shifts gears toward the emotional and psychological toll of these crimes. Another dead body is found (The structure of Borgman's narrative means that this woman is introduced, forgotten, and then treated as some surprise twist—with a literal explosion involved), while another victim is presumed to have been killed by this constant fugitive. As for the victims, only Tonya/Sharon's story seems to matter, and even then, the narrative still has a secondary, much-later investigation, led by journalist and author Matt Birkbeck (Two of his books serve as the foundation of the documentary), to dissect. There's a potentially fascinating section in which Birkbeck and others, gaining access to the killer whose real name is Franklin Delano Floyd, start to uncover the terrible abuse this man suffered himself. It goes nowhere, though, except to re-affirm the nature of this narcissistic personality and perpetual liar. Within the context of how the movie mostly bypasses the lives and histories of the man's victims, the attempt to understand Floyd on a psychological level also feels misguided and ill-advised. The new search involves trying to discover the true identity of Tonya/Sharon—the woman whose murder set the unraveling of Floyd's crimes in motion. In terms of storytelling, the process of flashbacks and interviews commences again, and the focus of Girl in the Picture never digs deeper than presenting the cold-hearted facts with a mostly cold tone, as well as an unfortunate goal of shocking more than humanizing. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products Buy the Book [A Beautiful Child] Buy the Book [A Beautiful Child] (Kindle Edition) Buy the Book [Finding Sharon] (Kindle Edition)
|
