Agenda Movie Club: Cropsey

Cropsey

Barbara Brancaccio, Joshua Zeman

2009

This is streaming on Hulu, so I checked it out because Roger Ebert has it on his list of Top 10 Documentaries of the year. I’m not quite sure where he’s coming from.

Not that it’s bad, it’s not. It’s just fine. There are some good things here. I love the framing– that our urban legends (“Cropsey” is a boogeyman that Staten Island kids thought would come get them if they wandered out into the dark woods, or went into the old mental institution, or whatever) may or may not have some basis in reality, and that often “reality” isn’t the important thing anyway. There’s more than that, of course.

And it was interesting enough. There’s a guy who was convicted of kidnapping a girl (though not convicted of her murder, even though the girl was found in a shallow grave and most people assume the guy killed her). The man, Andre Rand, looks like a killer. At one point, he’s a wide-eyed, drooling mess. And not because he’s mentally challenged or anything like that. He seems pretty intelligent.

But there’s no physical evidence, and, really, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, either. There are eyewitnesses who say they saw Rand with the girl, but I’m not sure what else there is.

But that’s the thing– there could be plenty else, but the filmmakers never say. I know absolutely nothing about this case (or these cases– Rand ends up convicted of another kidnapping, and suspected of many others, though bodies are never found), and I don’t feel like there was a lot presented here that helps me know more. The filmmakers are definitely on a “did he or didn’t he” quest, but all I see is what they tell me. Where are the jurors who convicted Rand? What were they thinking? Why should I trust that these two filmmakers are doing anything other than trying to tell a compelling story?

But maybe it doesn’t matter. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe, sometimes, what’s “real” check out and doesn’t come back. Maybe our perception of “real” is all that ultimately matters (I think we call all agree that Errol Morris does this better than anyone).

And I feel like the movie is disjointed– I couldn’t tell why they were moving from one part to another sometimes.

But, again, maybe it doesn’t matter. This movie brings in old institutions (where former residents may or may not live now in underground lairs), Satan worshipping cults (which may or may not exist), child killers who may or may not even be kidnappers, and people who may just want someone to answer for crimes. These are fascinating things, and they feed well into the “real urban legend” frame the filmmakers create. I just wasn’t completely blown away by the full, finished product.

(I realize this wasn’t the point of the movie, but I suspect that some part of the reason I didn’t love this is because I’ve read a lot about serial murders and similar things for the past 15 or so years, and this wasn’t exactly anything new to me. So I admit that could have colored my perception.)

(Also, I hate voice-over narration. I know that’s unreasonable, but there it is.)