Sunday, February 27, 2000

JonBenet movie casts suspicion on outsiders

The trouble with "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," airing in two parts on CBS (8 p.m. tonight and Wednesday), is that it tries so hard not to blame anyone directly for the unsolved murder of little JonBenet Ramsey that it ends up blaming everyone involved.
  Directed by Lawrence Schiller from material in his book of the same name, this docudrama goes to almost absurd lengths to cast suspicion on a number of people outside the Ramsey family. Perhaps it was the neighborhood Santa Claus who molested and bludgeoned the pretty 6-year-old in 1996. Or maybe the babysitter. Or the photographer who took photos of JonBenet that made her look like a pouty Lolita. Or possibly an intruder who managed not to leave any footprints in the snow as he entered and exited the house through doors that remained locked from the inside.
  Or JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy, although they’ve never been charged with the crime.
  Shuffling the facts
  Through the four hours of drama about evidence or lack of it in the Ramsey home and guilt or lack of it on the part of the Ramseys themselves, the movie shuffles and redeals the simple facts of this baffling case.
  On a Christmas night in Boulder, Colo., in a locked-up house occupied by two parents and two small children, a murder occurred. Sometime after 10:30 p.m., somebody brutally strangled JonBenet with a crude garrote, then bashed her skull with something such as a flashlight. Whoever did this awful thing left her dead on the concrete floor in a small basement room, her hands bound with cord, her mouth taped shut. But they gently covered her body with her favorite white blanket.
  The events that unfolded the next day and in the ensuing months of investigation have been chronicled repeatedly on TV over the past three years on magazine shows, tabloid programs, talk shows, newscasts and special investigative reports. They’re told again in and in sometimes microscopic detail in "Perfect Murder."
  That they’re not told with grace or even a semblance of good taste is what’s most troubling about the piece.
  Writer-director Schiller allows his camera to catch sight of the stiff blue corpse of JonBenet (obviously a plastic doll doubling for a dead child) as John Ramsey (played by Ronnie Cox) carries her awkwardly upstairs and then curls up beside the body on the floor.
  That’s followed soon after by a slow pan up an autopsy table, where a child actor playing the dead JonBenet, complete with blue lips and purple bruises, lies waiting for the medical examiner.
  Gruesome. Unnecessary. Exploitative.
  No clues
  The Boulder police are portrayed as inept bumblers at war with the district attorney’s office. The district attorney, Alex Hunter (played by Ken Howard), comes across as a press-seeking snob cowed by the wealthy Ramseys.
  The Ramseys? Puzzles wrapped in enigmas. Working only from police transcripts, personal observations and the few public appearances the couple has made, Schiller doesn’t seem to have a clue who and what these people are. Were they loving parents devastated by the murder or twisted killers covering each other’s tracks?
  The casting of the Ramseys doesn’t help. Marg Helgenberger over-acts as Patsy. Ronnie Cox is a shallow John.
  The rest of the cast is filled with names - Ann-Margret as Patsy’s mother, John Heard as a police detective, Kris Kristofferson as a private investigator - but they utter wooden dialogue in scenes that don’t do much to move the story along.
  And as long as the case remains unsolved (a grand jury last fall failed to hand down any indictments), it will remain a fascinating, very sad but unfinished story.
  Schiller provides only a weak and ambiguous wrap-up at the end of his movie, with a cop surmising that "a stranger killed JonBenet . . . a stranger named Patsy Ramsey."
  Huh?
  "It’s not my job to solve the crime," Schiller told TV critics recently. But it was his job to make a compelling four-hour miniseries out of an American tragedy.
  He failed on both scores.
  Also this week