Tabloid

News of the World has wound down its presses for good, but dry your eyes because on Friday we’ll have Tabloid – the latest marvel from master documentarian Errol Morris, and the only summer movie that tackles the important issues head-on: beauty pageants, cloning, and boogers!

The experience of watching Joyce McKinney’s spectacular story unfold is nothing short of transcendental. To synopsize this film is to belittle the careful nuance this masterpiece puts forth, so we’ll just say that as a young beauty queen with a MENSA-level IQ, McKinney regales us with her travels to the UK to reclaim her lover who was sent away on Mormon mission. A true Don Quixote, things escalate for McKinney from here as her odyssey grows more strange, violent, and headline-worthy as the years roll by.

Despite the incredulity McKinney’s misadventures evoke, the beauty of Tabloid lies in Morris’s demonstrated empathy for his protagonist. The film avoids casting judgment on the narrator, a mercy granted by Morris that can’t be found in the tabloids and blogosphere of the real world. It is this attempt to understand McKinney—who, in all fairness, has earned her position among the ranks of the Octomom and Balloon Boy—that gives the film its substance despite the levity of the subject matter. It is in Morris’s sensitivity in dealing with his dubious heroine that we can see how a madcap comedy like Tabloid and the grave postmortem Fog of War could have come from the same mind.

In Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), Morris gives the former US Secretary of State a platform to relate his war-time decisions on his own terms—decisions that held hundreds of thousands of human lives in the balance. A film like this could not stand up as anything more than propaganda if Morris had cast judgments on McNamara’s actions. As in all of his films, Morris allows his subjects to reveal their dynamism and thus their humanity—a testament to the efficacy of Morris’s simple interview style and his prowess as a gifted listener.

Luckily for us, Tabloid is fun above all things, recalling lighter works like Gates of Heaven. What Tabloid is able to reveal about America’s affinity for the ridiculous is anyone’s guess, but given the media blizzard that is our current cultural climate, it may even be possible to look back on Tabloid as a story from a simpler time.