"My Grandfather Charles Manson" Review

As far as true crime documentary premises go, My Grandfather Charles Manson has a heck of a hook: The father of filmmaker Sophia Maddox (who co-directs with Alexandra Orton), Daniel Arguelles, who never knew who his father was, discovers via a half-brother who finds him via Ancestry.com that their father is Charles Manson, thus Sophia is Manson's granddaughter. (Free Band Name!) Wondering whether this connection explains her father's moods or her creativity, she embarks on a quest to research the origins of the notorious cult leader upon whose orders seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, were murdered in 1969.

Using her genetic relationship, he travels to Indiana, Manson's childhood home and where his life as a career inmate in reform schools and prisons, subjected to brutal corporal punishment as well as rape - both as victim and perpetrator - began twisting him into the infamous figure he became. This also begins to hint at forming an apologist case for Manson, that he's a victim of the system so it's really the system to blame. Uhhhhhhhh... She also interviews former members of the Manson Family along with a surviving prosecutor of the case and an author who met Manson hundreds of times and wrote about him. 

While some of the backstory stuff is illuminating, the bulk of the film consists of Sophia crying while talking to an unseen therapist as she "processes her feelings" and navel-gazes about What It All Means. Dad, who had no idea his mother had hooked up with Manson in the late-1950s for a one/two-night stand or why she was beating him with a lamp cord when Manson and Fam were arrested, reacts especially badly to what she's doing, storming out of an interview he sat in on and cutting off his daughter, blocking her phone number, prompting more crying.

I've always had an aversion to documentarians who put themselves in front of the camera as if they're the subject (e.g. Michael Moore's slovenly obese presence in his fabricated scenarios) but considering Sophia is as much of the subject as Manson, it's inescapable. But it's also meaningless when it's not being annoying. Where's her mother in her backstory? What's the deal with the footage of dad screaming at her in the backseat which initially appears to be part of the current drama but then seems to be from her teenage years?

Most baffling is how after 1-3/4 hours of crying and obsessing over how she will be perceived as Manson's granddaughter, she decides to reclaim her identity by changing her surname from Arguelles, which was the name of Daniel's adoptive father, to Maddox, which was Manson's mother's maiden name (Manson was his stepfather). That's right - after agonizing about what it means to he the descending of a monster, she ditches her father's name for her grandmother's. What a self-absorbed brat.

Could My Grandfather Charles Manson been better if it had been directed solo by Orton so that Sophia's constantly being the center of things been more understandable and potentially better contextualized? Perhaps. But as it stands, like most self-obsessed Zoomer twits, Sophia mistakes her feels for her importance.