“I did not murder Mommy on purpose,” John Boyle Jr. insists. He stares at his son, Collier Landry, through thick glasses. “That’s not my intention, I did not plan that.”
Collier Landry faces his father in an overwhelmingly taupe prison room. “Did you want me as a son?” he asks curtly. “Did you want a child?”
Boyle responds as if by rote. “Sure.”
So goes Landry’s futile quest for fatherly approval, the journey at the heart of illustrious documentarian Barbara Kopple’s latest project, “A Murder in Mansfield.” The film follows Landry as he returns to his Ohio hometown to uncover the truth about his mother’s murder. Having testified against him at age 12, Landry has no doubt that his father deliberately killed her. The law has no doubt, either — Boyle is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Noreen Boyle. Still, Landry longs for closure and revisits his past in an attempt to reboot his hindered adolescence. The resulting narrative is captivating but ultimately overwrought and emotionally unsatisfying.
The film starts out strong, relying on footage of Boyle’s 1990 trial to set the scene. We see twelve-year-old Collier Landry Boyle takes the witness stand. A deceptively cherubic figure, the tween offers his testimony like he’s landed the lead role in the school play. At once flamboyant and curt, Collier condemns his father with no hesitation. Boyle, however, maintains his innocence.
Twenty-six years later, Landry returns to Mansfield. Interested in the “collateral damages and consequences of violence,” the LA-based filmmaker wants to learn more about how his mother’s murder affected his community. He visits his childhood home, the lead detective in his mother’s case, and his adoptive parents. They recount stories of him at the time, a troubled yet gregarious child. These scenes are intercut with photos, home movies, and more trial footage. Little Collier paints his father John as a neglectful abuser, the kind of man who only valued his family over his mistresses when he was physically and verbally berating them. “My counselor told me that she believes in happy endings,” his 1990 diary reads. “I don’t.”
This journey into Collier’s past is an undoubtedly emotional one, as the narrative of his hollow, interrupted childhood contrasts with the loving adults who cared for him in the aftermath. There’s a particularly strong sequence between him and Shelley Bowden, his mother’s best friend. As the two of them go through old photographs, they share the kind of easy conversation that can only flow between two deeply connected people.
Then, the warmth all but disappears. Landry embarks on a trip to his high school to revisit his show choir, where he engages the current students in a bizarre and clearly staged Q&A. Perhaps this moment exists in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two Colliers — child Collier, surviving the loss of both his parents and adult Collier, on a quest for the truth — but it falls flat in the face of zero context. We ultimately know nothing about Landry as an adult, and that doesn’t change.
The film is persistently tight-lipped about Landry, making it difficult to empathize with him even as he embarks on an incredibly emotional journey. Shadows of little Collier still exist in our subject, as he investigates and narrates with a unique dramatic flair, but they ring false coming from a man so confoundingly inscrutable. The film does little to tease out its own emotional complexities, instead relying on voiceover and a jarring therapy session to explain Landry’s inner narrative. The therapy is as inharmonious as the high school visit — we don’t know anything about this therapist, or his past with Landry — and it ultimately seems forced into the picture in an attempt to offer the viewer some kind of emotional resolution.
Even the climactic meeting between Landry and his imprisoned father is steeped in restraint. Their dialogue is shot like a sitcom, an odd mix of medium long shots and shot-reverse-shot camerawork cutting up what should be an untouched moment. The film refuses to let its audience just feel, instead, inundating scenes with archival photos or discordant cuts. The result is an over-controlled, clinical story about catharsis. Execution and subject clash and both come up short.
“It’s actually better than a soap opera,” a news footage looky-loo crows in the first minute of the film. She and many other Mansfield residents treated Boyle’s trial like a spectacle. Now, viewers of “A Murder in Mansfield” watch its aftermath play out in a similarly sterile fashion. Perhaps if we knew more about Landry’s adult life or his dialogue were shot in a more realistic, raw way, we could be empathetically present in his story. For now, though, we’re just outsiders peeping in. [C-]