Documentarian Errol Morris has a reputation dating back to the 1980s when his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line resulted in the release of a wrongly-convicted man serving life in prison (his death sentence had been overturned and commuted to life). Since then, he's churned out many more documentaries including the 2003 Oscar-winning The Fog of War, but he's been off my radar for pretty much all of them. So I was surprised to see he was behind the new Netflix documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders, a subject so worn-out for Gen Xers like me that I probably would've skipped it if not for Morris' involvement. I should've skipped it anyway.
Morris is adapting Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and if you think that sounds like a buffet of conspiracy buff red meat, you are correct. It's got MKUltra, LSD, mind control, COINTELPRO, all the stuff that makes some people stock up on tinfoil. O'Neill's premise is that an MKUltra operative named Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, who was also the psychiatrist who evaluated Jack Ruby after he killed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald somehow crossed paths with Charles Manson in San Francisco in the 1960s and trained him in the methods which would allow him to brainwash his Family of hippies to become assassins able to kill without compunction or memory of committing such deeds. Scenes from The Manchurian Candidate are interspersed to hammer the point.
He accuses prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi of fabricating the Tate-LaBianca cases against the Mason Family in order to write the book Helter Skelter which became a huge miniseries in the Seventies. (And pretty much doomed Steve Railsback's career.) Manson's constant ability to never get sent back to slam for infinite parole violations is deemed further proof that shenanigans were afoot. While amplifying these theories, Morris flat out tells O'Neill that he's not sure if he's buying all that he's selling.
The alternate viewpoint comes from Bobby Beausoleil, a former Family member who had been arrested the day before the Sharon Tate murders (which Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood invented a hilarious alternate outcome) and is heard in phone interviews for he's still in prison for murdering a drug dealer, who suggests a more plausible explanation: Everyone was stupid, crazy, on drugs, members of a cult, and the cops were bozos who screwed up constantly.
Sharon Tate, the Folger's coffee heiress and three others didn't die because of some CIA mind control plot, but because Manson was angry at a producer who failed to secure him a record deal and wanted him dead and sent his Family to kill him at the house he rented unaware that the producer had moved on and Roman Polanski and his wife were the current renters.
CHAOS: The Manson Murders purports to be raising serious questions and while they offer some head-scratching circumstantial evidence, Morris and O'Neill don't close any of the circles they begin to draw. And after nearly 60 years, does it even matter in the face of current governmental threats?
As for the Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation, there's nothing special about any of it. It's boxes checked with nothing in them. If you still want to watch this, the cheap tiers are fine.
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
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