There's been a brutal killing in Boulder, Colorado: JonBenét Ramsey, a 6-year-old girl from an affluent family, has been found murdered on Christmas Day in 1996, her body discovered in the basement of her parents' maze-like house some eight hours after they first reported her missing. Thus begins a chain of events that leads to lies, deception, bruised egos, terminated careers, fallen reputations, lawsuits, and so much ill will and bad blood that Boulder is probably still reeling from the aftershocks of this case. Excellent docudrama, a four-hour CBS movie-for-television chronicling the baffling true-life murder investigation, makes its case right from the start: that it is irrelevant how much time has transpired since the actual crime occurred (irrelevant, also, how many years have passed since this movie originally aired in 2000). This is a case that deserves to be solved, and it's an honest-to-God puzzler no matter how many news programs have attempted to cover the territory. Directing with enormous skill and a keen-eyed sensibility, Lawrence Schiller, working from Tom Topor's adaptation of Schiller's own book, gives us an awful lot of material to sift through, and yet he makes the picture a compulsively-watchable yarn featuring dozens of complicated characters introduced with clarity and aplomb. It would be next to impossible to eliminate scenes or conversations without leaving unanswered questions behind, so the running time is justified; still, I did grow tired of a subplot involving a "bottom feeder" reporter from a tabloid journal, while Kris Kristofferson's homicide detective Lou Smit never quite comes to life (Smit stood steadfastly behind the child's accused parents, and had a nifty summation of events which he proclaimed in a private session, yet much of the time we don't know where Smit stands with some of the evidence gathered--or why he seemed to believe the parents' story from the get-go). The film is frustrating: it's well-informed and yet cloudy. Since the case remains unsolved, there's not much satisfaction in the finale (we as viewers want an emotional release and, of course, we don't get it). Nevertheless, the filmmakers provide some great food-for-thought here and the large cast is superb, particularly Ken Howard as District Attorney Alex Hunter (who waged a war of words and actions with the Colorado Police Dept.) and Marg Helgenberger as the child's erratic mother. The wealthy parents, who stonewalled the police for four months and seemed to lead everyone in charge around by the hand, are two of the most fascinating murder witnesses in criminal history, and this is most likely the best examination of them we'll ever get on film.
