Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

You may or may not have noticed, but I haven't posted any reviews of anything for over three months.

This isn't because I've forgotten, or because I decided to give it all up and go farm Alpacas up in Colorado or something. The reason is simple: I just really haven't seen a movie worth writing about. I started an Avatar review, then realized I had nothing to say and gave up. I considered an Edge of Darkness and Book of Eli review, then decided not to bother. I even thought of writing something short and sweet about The Crazies, and then was immediately distracted by something shiny and forgot all about it.

But here it is, 4:40 in the morning. My stomach hurts. My eyes are red and swollen. My throat is filled with a lump the size of a golf ball. I've been lying here in the darkness of my bedroom for the last hour and a half trying to make myself think of something -- anything -- other than the film I just saw. And I can't do it. This thing has burrowed into my gray matter like a rat, and it's just sitting there chewing away at the wiring.

Some movies get under your skin. Others bite. This one puts a fishhook into your testicles and gives a good hard yank.

This movie will crush you. Oh my God, will it crush you...

Back in 2001 Dr. Andrew Bagby was 28 years old. He had just abandoned a miserable surgical internship in Syracuse in favor of a general practice internship in Pennsylvania. Life was finally looking up for the guy. He had broken up with his fiancé a few years previous -- had gotten his heart thoroughly broken, in fact -- and wasn't feeling too good about himself, so while attending medical school in Newfoundland he had started an ill-advised relationship with Dr. Shirley Turner, a two-time divorcee and absentee mother thirteen years his senior.

But now that he was in Pennsylvania, he was ready to move on with his life. He and his fiancé had managed to maintain a friendship, and he was slipping into his new internship like a glove. The only thing left to do was somehow break it off with Turner, who everyone around him thought was crazy but who he still had some affection for. He tried to let her down easy -- Andrew Bagby was a good guy, and the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. So he broke it off as gently as he could and put her on a plane back to Iowa, where she was living at the time. When she landed she immediately turned around and drove 1,600 miles back to Pennsylvania and demanded he talk to her. Being the good guy that he was, he agreed. They met in a nearby park. God knows what was said between them. She shot him five times and then drove back to Iowa. Then, coldly and calculatedly, she left a message on his answering machine telling him that she just wanted to say hi and that she loved him.

It just so happens that Bagby's best friend from the age of seven was an aspiring filmmaker named Kurt Kuenne. Not knowing exactly what to do with his grief, Kuenne picked up a camera and started interviewing everyone he could -- Bagby's parents, his extended family in both Missouri and the UK, his friends, his acquaintances, his colleagues. He wanted to learn everything he could about the friend he had lost. In a way the project was a form of denial. As he says in the film, he was on a mission to bring Andrew Bagby back to life.

Meanwhile, Turner managed to flee back to Newfoundland before the American justice system could get its hands on her, and she very quickly revealed that she was pregnant with Bagby's baby. David and Kate Bagby -- Andrew Bagby's grieving parents (he was their only child) -- immediately decided to sue for custody, sold everything they owned and moved to Canada. The baby was born, and Turner named him Zachary. Kuenne redirected the focus of his film as a sort of open letter to Zachary in hopes that it would help him get to know the father that was stolen from him.

The Canadian justice system decided that it was okay to let a suspected murderer out on bail and allow her to raise her child while it drug its feet on extradition. David and Kate gritted their teeth and negotiated with Turner for rights to visit their grandson while the custody battle moved with excruciating slowness through the courts. Turner used it as a means to further torment the parents of the man who committed the mortal sin of breaking up with her, extorting them for diapers and baby food money and essentially strong-arming them into going on playdates with her and her son so they could spend time with him. If you ever wanted to get a hint what it might be like to talk daily on the phone about birthday parties and babysitters with the woman who murdered your only son, this movie gives you a pretty good idea.

Kuenne trudged along with his personal project, obsessively interviewing seemingly anyone and everyone who knew Andrew. He combed through countless hours of home videos, countless piles of photographs. What emerges is a portrait of a man who any one of us would have been proud to call a friend. In death, as we know, just about everyone becomes a saint in the eyes of those who remember him. Certainly there must be a degree of that happening here. But at the very least, it becomes clear that Andrew Bagby was nothing short of an honest-to-God, bonafide Good Dude. We all have a friend like him, the guy (or girl) we grew up with who just thinking about makes us smile, even ten or twenty years later. The person you can go a year without speaking to and then pick up the phone and talk to like it was yesterday. No less than six men say they were planning to have Andrew be the best man at their wedding. That tells you something.

As we get to know Andrew, we also get to know David and Kate. If Andrew Bagby comes off as a saint, they are nothing short of heroic. The Job-like level of their suffering is nearly impossible to comprehend. They continue to play nice with their son's murderer, stoically putting their dwindling trust in the Canadian justice system and always dreaming of the day that Turner will finally be locked up for good and Zachary will be theirs. Kuenne walks us through the the tortured Canadian courts, where one bad decision leads to an absurdist, Kafka-esque comedy of errors that is about as funny as a nail gun shot to the forehead. When Turner is released on bail a second time because a sympathetic judge doesn't believe that her crime (First Degree Murder, we silly Yanks like to call it) indicates any sort of threat to society, you'll want to put your fist through a wall. When little Zachary is once again returned to Turner's poisonous bosom, you'll want to tear your hair out and scream.

And when the inevitable happens, you will.

The letter-to-Zachary construct is a manipulative filmmaker's trick. I won't argue with that. But it works. Kuenne uses it to bypass the tropes of your average true-crime documentary and to re-center the film's focus where it belongs: on the life that was lost and on the human wreckage that that loss has left in its wake. You come to love Andrew -- or at the very least understand why he was so loved by everyone who knew him -- and you come to look upon David Bagby and Kate with nearly Divine awe.

Kuenne manages to create a convincing polemic in favor of victim's rights, as well as a vision of human evil that will curdle like rotten milk in your stomach. But mostly, he has penned a crushingly heartfelt love letter to a dead friend, and to the shattered family his friend has left behind.

Watch this movie. Watch it and then pick up the phone and call your buddy from high school. When you're done catching up, call your parents and tell them you love them.

Watch this movie. But don't watch it before you go to bed, or you'll find yourself awake -- hoarse, sniffly, and red-eyed -- at five in the morning just like me.