Death-row interviews with Theodore Bundy

 

    In January of 1989, 42-year-old serial killer Theodore Bundy was executed in a Florida prison, having confessed to committing 30 homicides during the 1970s. Bundy's gruesome crimes need no further description here, but as a well-spoken, clean-cut killer, Bundy secured his place in the hierarchy of monstrous American crime figures. 

    I'd read enough about Bundy to approach No Man of God, a drama based on death-row interviews conducted by FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, with some misgiving.  Did we really need a deep dive into the mind of a criminal who already has commanded a lot of attention?

     Director Amber Sealey builds her movie around the interviews in which a sly, calculating Bundy (Luke Kirby) talks with Hagmaier (Elijah Wood). 

    Sealey's approach puts us in roughly the same position as Hagmaier. We’re constantly trying to evaluate Bundy as we search for clues to the question that haunts every serial-killer movie. Why did this person commit such terrible crimes? 

    Sealey opens the movie up a bit with news footage and breaks the claustrophobic prison mood with the late-picture introduction of an anti-capital punishment lawyer (Aleksa Palladino) who tries to stave off Bundy's execution.

     According to the movie, Focus on the Family evangelist James Dobson (Christian Clemenson) took some of Hagmaier's valuable interview time to conduct a final interview with Bundy just before his execution. Bundy told Dobson that hard-core pornography played a major role in twisting his mind toward evil.

    Hagmaier -- a Christian -- had no objection to Bundy's execution. He wanted to understand a serial killer. It was part of an early FBI effort to develop profiles of killers, a process depicted in Netflix’s compelling Mind Hunter series.

     Kirby isn't a dead-ringer for Bundy but he captures the mercurial way Bundy shifted moods, his desire to control, and his imagined superiority over ordinary mortals. He also conveys the intelligence that Bundy brought to the job of creating the character he sometimes seems to be constructing for Hagmaier's benefit.

    A youthful-looking Wood -- he's 40 -- wisely doesn't try to compete with Kirby. He makes Hagmaier a committed listener, a resolute and religious man who Bundy came to regard as a "friend." 

     Toward the end, Bundy agrees to take Hagmaier into the depths of his psyche. It's a powerful scene in which Kirby reveals what it was like for Bundy to commit one of his murders.

    Zac Efron played Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, director Joe Berlinger's foray into Bundy's world. Unlike Berlinger, Sealey doesn't dramatize Bundy's life as a killer. 

   When I engage with movies such as No Man of God, I ask myself why I'm watching and why I've watched other films like it. Perhaps it's because we never seem to get a handle on serial killing and never will.

    Many years ago I read an article in Newsweek in which a psychiatrist outlined shared characteristics he identified in most serial killers. He listed some, but qualified his remarks: For every serial killer's awful background, he could find someone with a worse personal history who never committed any crimes.

    Bundy, of course, didn't have a horrible childhood. He insisted that he had grown up in "a fine, solid Christian home." 

    Maybe mystery explains the fascination. We look for answers -- and we should. None may be forthcoming but that doesn't mean we're able to turn away.

A dog's search for meaning

A Dog's Purpose arrives amid controversy. The movie? It's no better than OK.

The other day, a friend told me that she had been looking forward to A Dog's Purpose as a welcome diversion from the cares of the day, which -- need I remind you -- are getting "yuger" by the minute. But she also had read that TMZ had shown a video in which a German shepherd resisted leaping into a water tank during filming. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called for a boycott.

According to USA Today, the film's director, Lasse Hallstrom, called for an investigation. Producer Gavin Polone said he had reviewed the raw footage from that day and insisted that the TMZ release was misleading.

Obviously, I have no idea which side to take, but I have to admit that as a dog lover, any suggestion of the mistreatment of animals puts me on edge, and I certainly thought about the accusations when watching a scene in which a German shepherd, working as a police dog, leaps into swirling waters to save a girl who had been kidnapped.

Off-screen controversy aside, the movie -- based on a novel by W. Bruce Cameron -- deals with a dog who's reincarnated multiple times. The dog, who narrates the film, retains the same consciousness as it moves from life to life, each time re-emerging as a new species of canine. Of course, that means that the dogs die, a process shot through gauzy, milk-white images that lead to the reappearance of an eager puppy.

To say that A Dog's Purpose steps into large piles of sentiment would be an understatement, but it's also true that the movie tries to temper its warm, huggy feeling with attempts at realism. A father in one episode turns out to be an abusive alcoholic, the shepherd's policeman owner is a lonely man who must watch his dog die from a gunshot wound, and a low-life owner abandons his incarnation of the dog near a railroad track.

The dog -- voiced by Josh Gad -- first appears as Bailey, a golden retriever puppy who's rescued by a boy named Ethan (Bryce Gheisar). Ethan's mom (Juliet Rylance) lobbies for Ethan to keep Bailey over the objections of the boy's dad (Luke Kirby).

Boy and dog bond in the movie's longest episode, as the story follows young Ethan to high school where he's played by K.J. Apa. The teen-aged Ethan also acquires a girlfriend (Britt Robertson) who quickly becomes part of what Bailey calls his "pack."

An aging Bailey ultimately must be put down in a vet's office before reincarnating as a female working in the Chicago Police Department. John Ortiz portrays the cop who takes the dog -- now named Ellie -- under wing.

We next meet the dog as Tino, a Corgi adopted by a female student (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) who doesn't have much by way of a social life.

The dogs' many lives conclude with the appearance of Buddy, an Australian Shepherd/St. Bernard Mix who finds his way to the farm operated by the new-grown Ethan (Dennis Quaid). Buddy decides that it's his job to reunite Ethan with the now grown Hannah (Peggy Lipton).

The Swedish-born Hallstrom (Hachi, A Dog's Tale, Chocolat and The Cider House Rules) uses period music to let us know that the story is advancing from the '50s to the present. He includes some shots from the point of view of the movie's various dogs, and milks the emotional scenes for tears.

Because of some of its darker twists, I'm not sure about the age-appropriateness of the movie, which clearly is aimed at a family audience. And, yes, the dogs are cute and expressive in the way only dogs can be.

So what about a dog's purpose? In his various lives, our doggy narrator keeps wondering about the purpose of his life. Unable to enroll in a philosophy course or experience a religious epiphany, our reincarnated canine eventually concludes that his purpose is a simple one: Rather than posing unanswerable questions, he should simply "be here now."

It's not depicted, but can we assume that somewhere along the line, the dog has read Ram Dass? If you don't get the reference, you missed the '70s, and it's too late to go back.

Addicted to the highs of madness

Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby co-star in a movie about bipolar lovers.

A deglamorized Katie Holmes plays a young poet suffering from bipolar disorder in Touched With Fire, a movie inspired by a 1993 non-fiction exploration of mania, depression and creativity by Kay Redfield Jamison.

Written and directed by Paul Dalio -- himself a sufferer from bipolar disorder -- the movie version teams Holmes with Luke Kirby, who portrays a struggling bipolar wannabe artist who wanders the streets of New York drawing graffiti. Kirby's Marco doesn't need much encouragement to advance his avidly delivered theories about the universe and his place in it. He can't believe that he doesn't hail from a distant planet where he'd feel more at home. He wants to get as high as the stars.

Dalio's script raises questions about whether it's possible to live a daringly creative life without simultaneously falling prey to bouts of madness. If Carla and Marco stay on their meds will they lose the creative spark that brings them together when both are hospitalized?

Once released from care, Carla and Marco become a couple, raising questions about how fit they are to make the kinds of decisions that now will be required of them, particularly when Carla becomes pregnant.

Katie's mom (Christine Lahti) and her father (Bruce Altman) are rightfully worried. Marco's father (Griffin Dunne) is no less concerned.
Both Holmes and Kirby are more than up to the task, and Dalio mostly tells the story from their points of view. In their manic phases, it's as if both have awakened inside Van Gogh's Starry Night, a painting that figures prominently in the story. Carla and Marco are energized by the enchantment of their vertiginous upswings in mood.

And that leads to another question. Would it be worth giving up the highest of highs for a stable life or are the peak points of mania so wildly intense and visionary that normality pales by comparison?

The problem Dalio has stems from this focus. Telling the story mostly from Carla and Marco's perspective tends to make us sympathetic to their desires (particularly strong with Marco) not to give up the inspirational peaks of their manic periods.

Dalio tries to temper this view with an awkwardly inserted, late-picture appearance by Jamison. She assures Carla and Marco that they can take their meds without diminishing their creative powers.

This less-than-organic ploy (almost a public service announcement) comes off as a near apology for shifting our sympathies toward Carla and Marco, an ungainly reminder that bipolar disorder doesn't count as a higher form of insight and fun.

None of this is to say that Dalio's movie fails to illuminate many of the problems stemming from bipolar disorder, and it finds credible ways of illustrating bipolar highs without too much overstatement.

And there powerfully observed moments. Near the beginning, Dunne's character visits his son, who hasn't been answering his phone. The young man's apartment has become a filthy clutter of books and junk. Marco has quit his job.

To us, it appears as if Marco's life has become a hopeless shambles: He, on the other hand, believes he has put his life on exactly the right course.

That kind of scene -- and there are others -- keeps Touched With Fire honest and affecting.

She's unsure what she wants

Can a marriage crumble gently? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz suggests the answer is "yes."

Take This Waltz -- a new movie from director Sarah Polley -- hits, misses and sometimes seems to be searching for a point as it follows the emotionally inconclusive life of Margot (Michelle Williams), a woman who's slipping into the final stages of a crumbling marriage. Although there are good scenes in Take This Waltz, which Polley also wrote, the movie doesn't amount to as much as you might hope, particularly considering that Polley's debut feature -- Away From Her -- was a restrained and quietly moving story about a couple dealing with the onset of the wife's Alzheimer's. The story in Take This Waltz is driven by Margot's long and not always intriguing flirtation with one of her neighbors (Luke Kirby). Kirby's Daniel is an artist who supports himself by pulling a rickshaw around Toronto. Very quaint. Margot's husband Lou (a surprisingly credible Seth Rogen) spends most of his time experimenting in the couple's kitchen. He's writing a cookbook about the many ways in which chicken can be prepared. Polley may have wanted to bring Margot to a point at which she's able to free herself from both the intoxicating pull of new romance and loyalty to her husband of five years. At times, it feels as if Polley drops story obligations to say something that she thinks needs addressing. A nude shower scene at a local pool, for example, seems calculated to show how women's bodies look when they're not being portrayed from an erotically charged male perspective. And in what amounts to a reach, Polley casts comic Sarah Silverman as Lou's sister; Silverman proves interesting enough as a recovering alcoholic who's as acerbic as she is self-aware. Nothing about Take This Waltz made me less respectful of Polley's talent. She's a nervy director who's willing to take chances, and she shows a real flair for casual interaction. I liked what I liked about Take This Waltz, ignored the rest and look forward to seeing where Polley, still best known as an actress, goes next.