Casting in a Different Light

As the new year rolled around, I was confident I'd at least heard of all the movies thought to be in the hunt for an Oscar nomination. But "Oscar bait" and "critically praised" aren't always quite the same thing. When critics published their Best of 2017 lists, one movie that popped up here and there was one I'd never even heard of before: Casting JonBenet.

Casting JonBenet is an unusual documentary film that hit on the film festival circuit and was picked up for streaming on Netflix. The "JonBenet" of the title is, of course, JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old pageant queen whose 1996 death was a tabloid sensation. The documentary is essentially the real story of the making of a fake movie. Under the pretense of filming a dramatized movie about the case, the documentary makers call in dozens of actors to audition for a variety of roles. The documentary is made up of their read-throughs, and of Q&A with them in the audition room, where their thoughts about the case and its major "characters" are probed.

Despite the fact that the Ramsey case occurred nearby in Boulder, Colorado, I took almost no note of it at the time. While it certainly ticked the "true crime" box that should have interested me, the tabloid/sensationalist aspect of it was a big turn off. (I didn't follow the O.J. Simpson trial either. Maybe when they make a season of American Crime Story about JonBenet, I'll take an interest.) What I mean to say is that there was a fair amount of information in this documentary that was new to me that won't be new to many people.

But the film is barely even about the death of a little girl. It's much more about the preconceptions with which people judge others. It's even more about an actor's process. It's actually fascinating at times to see what the auditioning actors think about the people they're jockeying to play. One after another, each tells a story about his or her own past that they're convinced is THE window into their character's mind. Sometimes, you can see exactly how this informs their performance. Other times, you marvel at the Jekyll/Hyde transformation that good actors undergo, behaving as one person one moment, and someone completely different the next.

There are some fun moments scattered throughout the short documentary. Often they come in the form of cheeky editing, as the damning comments of one actor are juxtaposed against the more forgiving comments of another. A real highlight (though an especially ghoulish one) is the group of young kids auditioning for JonBenet's nine-year-old brother Burke -- seeing how they come out of their reserved shells when they perform, and how some access a shocking inner source of psychopathy.

The problem is, the documentary really doesn't stick the landing. Mainly, it doesn't seem to be saying much of anything. Squint hard, and you can glean from this film a sympathetic view of actors in general: people who make a living pretending to be other people seem to inherently have more empathy than average, an ability to see the good in anyone. But I think that's really forcing some subtext in.

Ultimately, I really don't know what it was about this documentary that compelled many critics to put this on their Best of 2017 lists. Maybe those critics were all obsessed with the original case to a degree I never was. Maybe they love looking behind the scenes at the making of a movie -- but since it's the making of a fake movie in this case, I'm still not sure I see the appeal.

I give Finding JonBenet a C+. At a brisk 80 minutes, it won't demand too much of your time. Still, I'm not really sure it's worth even that much.