The Laramie Project

If you're at all familiar with the television movie made about the brutal slaughter of Matthew Shepard from 2002, you'll already know why New York's Tectonic Theatre Company descended upon the town of Laramie. Home to just shy of 30,000 citizens, this town has been rocked by the recent homophobic attack on a twenty-one year old man by two young men who pistol whipped him before tying him to a fence in a nearby field and leaving him to die of his wounds and of hypothermia. The actors/writers have decided to theatrically recreate some of this story and so are travelling the length and breadth of the town seeking interviews with the residents - all whilst the town deals with it's own feelings of anger and guilt and whilst their courthouse tries the two men who are accused of perpetrating the crime. The timeline here begins whilst Shepard is still alive - comatose, but still alive, and by using a combination of news actuality and some poignant acting contributions from the likes of Dylan Baker (his doctor) and the usually quite effective Kathleen Chalfant this tries to get into the inner thoughts of a community that is largely, though not exclusively, disgusted by the behaviour of two young men. There's a lot of "this couldn't happen here" going on; a fair degree of public protest and a few reminders that "faggots will die in hell" from folks who didn't consider the murder of a gay lad to be such an heinous crime. Indeed, one individual suggested that he hoped the severely injured man used his last few moments of consciousness to reflect on his "lifestyle". It's grim stuff, mostly, and it serves to showcase just how a veneer of tolerance and acceptability can be smashed when drunken frenzy takes hold. Sadly, though, the construction of this film is a bit all over the place and I found the hybrid style of it's production left me uncertain as to what was real and what was derived from some fairly painful transcriptions. Of course, those do give a contemporaneousness to the storytelling but they also serve to provide a load of extra opinions that distract a little from the thrust of a story of three families - one of the victim, two of the killers themselves, which is left a little undeveloped. It also looks at the role of religion and faith, of community and of forgiveness and as the deceased man's father puts it at the end, perhaps it illustrates that from this crime might an healing process begin that extends beyond their own homes? It could have made for a better documentary than a docu-drama, I think.