Blue Caprice

Sometimes there are movies that are based on horrific true events which begin to raise some questions amongst the public as to if to the ethics around being released in close proximity to the event, or the glorifying of the awful acts for sake of profit and fame.  With the film Blue Caprice, which is based off of the Beltway sniper attacks from 2002, the passage of time is enough to not be trying to capitalize off of the brutal killings, but is also short enough to keep it in the memory of the viewers.  The memory of hearing the news sat in the back of my mind the whole time I viewed this film, leaving a true level of uneasiness.

As for glorifying the acts for the purpose of profit and fame, debuting director Alexandre Moors keeps the focus away from the acts themselves, at least on a visual level.  There is a scene where we do see one person getting shot, but for the most part everything happens off camera.  The drive of the film is not to horrify us with the gore of the events, but with the development and progression of evil that leads to those events.

The story is about Lee (Tequan Richmond) who is a fatherless teenager and whose mother disappears for long periods of time, leaving him to fend for himself on the island of Antigua.  Our first view of Lee is of him walking through the forest by himself, casually swinging a machete from side to side, his head pointed downwards at the ground.  One day he sees a very happy father, John (Isaiah Washington) with children and follows the family to the beach where he meets them and is brought into their fold.  After a number of months, we see that John has brought Lee back to America with him and has essentially adopted him to be his son.  John’s biological children are with his ex-wife, and he has a restraining order on him so we begin to see that perhaps there is a different side to this father-figure than Lee first met.

The mentoring process of John is at first very comforting and nurturing, though it slowly begins to transition into something much darker.  As the movie sheds more light on the character of John, we see that he is a person who has no concept of the consequences of the choices he makes.  He views society as the reason why his children were taken away, likening the people who used to live around him as ‘vampires’ because they are no longer living and they suck the life out of you. 

We see scenes of him running with his new son, almost as though he were training him, and we hear him start to indoctrinate Lee with his belief that society is fragile, like a house of cards, and that if someone were to give it a push by randomly murdering people, the entire system would collapse.  This character is brought to life by Washington’s ability to appear protective and nurturing, but then to allow the emotions to quickly shift to aggression, anger, and malice.

Lee almost has no choice but to fall prey to all of this, as we never get a sense that he has any backbone or voice of his own for the majority of the movie.  He appears to have no concept of how social interactions work, showing no confidence when he is engaged in conversations with people.  Lost and alien to the world around him, he clings to the teachings of the man he calls ‘dad.’  It is Lee who carries out the malicious will of John, at first showing regret, but then transitioning to a state of cold, mechanical routine and action around the subject. 

We watch him reading from an army manual about what a sniper is, memorizing it, and holding onto the book as though it were his bible.  It becomes quite chilling as he academically (and near lifelessly) reads, ‘the sniper must be able to calmly and deliberately kill targets that may not pose an immediate threat to him.  It is much easier to kill in self-defence, or in the defense of others, than to kill without an apparent reason.  The sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse.’

It is through all of this that the movie communicates the calm, disconnect between the killer and his actions.  It is this calm that is most chilling about the film.  It does not hover around the violent acts, but focuses on the paths that intersected in leading to these actions.  When it gets towards the end of the film, it makes the clear choice to not show the sniper murders.  We get a lot of scenes of seeing the blue Chevrolet Caprice (the car used in the sniper murders) driving along the highway, pulling off here and there, simple scenes that have an eerie emptiness to them.  We hear audio clips of calls to 911 and news reports on the radio which allows for an almost surreal realization of the events underway to begin sinking in.  For me personally, it did it in a similar fashion to when the reports started coming out in October 2002 of the shootings.

This is not a film that glorifies a single thing.  It is not meant to be a rocking good time, or even to entertain.  It is a very cold, calm look into the evil that can come out of our fellow human beings, causing them to perform actions which make little sense to the rest of the world.  When the film is complete, it leaves a chilling, unsettled feeling in the viewer as it has accomplished its task of showing just how disconnected society is from such thinking and actions. It is, quite simply, a scary look into the slow descent into a mentality that separates a human from the rest of their species and robs them of conscience.

Rating – 3.5 out of 4 stars