Last fall’s glut of 20th-anniversary television specials on the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey felt like a race to the bottom: Which program would most grotesquely exploit the 1996 killing of a 6-year-old girl? The competition was stiff. From the title alone, the new Netflix documentary “Casting JonBenét” sounds like the last thing we need.
In fact, it might be the only thing we need to move past a case that has generated so much fevered speculation.
Australian filmmaker Kitty Green traveled to Ramsey’s hometown, Boulder, Colorado, not to reinvestigate the crime but to get a sense of how residents felt about it. To do that, she posted a casting call for local actors to play the central figures in the case, including the tiny beauty pageant contestant herself, her parents, her brother and the police chief.
While the documentary includes some dramatizations, the movie consists mostly of interviews with the actors, who discuss the murder and who they think was responsible while also sharing intimate details about their lives. Getting to know these people reveals a lot. One woman, trying out for the part of JonBenét’s mother Patsy, is herself a mother approaching 40, so she’s highly offended at the theory that Patsy might have lost her mind, simply because she had a big birthday looming. For a different actress, that theory’s a no-brainer.
In short, “Casting JonBenét” isn’t a documentary about a murder, but about how people come to wildly different conclusions, based on the same information. It’s also about how easily we judge other people – whether we have the full story or not – and how much our present views are shaped by our pasts.
Occasionally the movie cuts away from interviews to re-enact historical events. Shot with a gray-blue palette, these scenes are more austere, and feature very little dialogue. During these moments, the tragedy comes into focus. In one scene, a hearse drives down a street. In another, police officers approach the Ramsey’s house the morning after the murder.
The interviews with prospective actors, by contrast, can be disarmingly funny. One performer, who moonlights as a sex educator, gives a brief tutorial on how to use different types of whips. At another point, a professional Santa Claus tells the camera that Patsy was probably “a royal b---- of a mother.”
“The evidence was compromised,” one actor laments, in an effort to sound like an expert. Others parse the psychology of the ransom note found at the scene.
Just when the movie’s talking heads start to grow tiresome, there’s a subtle shift in the film. The question-and-answer sessions are suddenly shot, like the re-enactments, with that same grave palette, and the stories become more tragic. One man, trying out for the part of JonBenét’s father, opens up about his recent cancer diagnosis; another talks about the ethics of working on this kind of project. His friends warned him, he says, against getting involved with anything associated with the case, but he thought something positive might come from his participation.
His instincts were correct. The final moments of the movie are a gorgeously choreographed scene involving many of the actors we’ve gotten to know, set to a hauntingly spare piano score by Nathan Larson. The participants act out the many different theories (though not the actual murder, thankfully). Watching so much agony on a set made to look like the Ramsey home, we’re reminded of the very real tragedy at the heart of a story that was reduced to tabloid fodder.
“Casting JonBenét” has no forensic experts or archival footage. It doesn’t get us any closer to the truth. But it might just get at something more profound: The idea that we should just acknowledge what this is – an awful, heartbreaking mystery – and let it go.
“Casting JonBenét” began streaming Friday on Netflix.
