After taking on former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in The Fog of War (2003), and probing the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Errol Morris deserves to have fun. It's at the expense of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who in 1977 became inexplicably obsessed with Kirk Anderson, a young Mormon who resembles Dwight Schrute from The Office. She followed him to England where she abducted him, tied him to a bed, and forced him to have sex with her. Her story is quaint as far as scandals go today, but the British press ran with it, and McKinney became so famous that at one glitzy event she outshone Joan Collins. Here she tells her story to Morris, who counters her version with that of other witnesses and punctuates it with goofy "headlines," animation, and archival footage. To what purpose? It's all very amusing, but maybe the film's keenest insight into tabloid journalism is Morris's own exploitation of the pitiful, perhaps delusional McKinney.
READ: "Errol Morris's magnificent obsessions" by Eugenia Williamson
