One thing is clear from Andrew Jarecki's account of the mysterious career of David Marks (Ryan Gosling): David should never have left the Vermont country store of the title, which he and his wife, Katie (Kirsten Dunst), established to escape his slumlord father (Frank Langella). But thanks in part to Jarecki's fractured chronology, everything else is up in the air in this adaptation of the true story of Robert Durst, troubled scion of a wealthy Manhattan family. Like, how did David go from wearing a tuxedo when first meeting Katie to wearing a dress in a rooming house while evading several murder raps? Jarecki didn't have all the answers in his brilliant documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003), either, but in that effort, ambiguity was a virtue. In his first fictional feature, he can't decide whether to opt for the open-ended inquiry of a non-fiction film or the resolved storytelling of Hollywood genre movie, so he winds up stranded in between.
