Jenny Popplewell’s true-crime documentary “American Murder: The Family Next Door” takes place in the kind of neighborhood where you can imagine somebody saying, “You don’t expect this sort of thing to happen here.” The corner of Frederick, Colorado we see in the movie is one of those sparkling new suburbs where the lawns and paint jobs are CGI bright and nothing much ever seems to happen, until it does. One can imagine a documentary in which the area’s very anonymity and a sudden, seemingly pointless murder in its midst are tied into a larger narrative. That is not this movie.
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Unfolding over a spectacularly short amount of time in August 2018, “American Murder” follows the disappearance of Shanann Watts, a pregnant mother, and her two children and the questioning of her husband, Chris. A friend of Shanann’s calls the police and hovers around Watts’ quiet home trying to figure out what is happening. The cops poke around, ask a few questions, and talk to the nosy neighbor, whose security camera is always running and who has a lot to say. They bring in Chris and start piecing together a timeline. Their questioning ramps up in intensity, a polygraph is brought in, and the self-evident truth comes out first as a trickle than a torrent.
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The gruesome particulars of what happened were covered at length in the popular press when Shanann first went missing and local TV crews swarmed the Watts suburb. Although her movie’s title suggests a Dateline exclusive teased for sweeps week, Popplewell lets the story unfold at a steady pace that never falls into the true-crime-TV trap of tension-building cuts, music, and ominous foreshadowing.
In its place, she constructs a dramatic scaffolding shorn of much of the usual documentary accouterment. Resembling almost more a found-footage montage than anything else, “American Murder” is built almost entirely out of three sources: text messages, social media videos and images, and police-sourced video (interrogation-room and officer-borne body cameras). Excepting some establishing drone shots and a scattering of residential surveillance video, that is it. What this leaves out is much of the pontificating and theorizing by talking-head experts. But it also creates a glassy barrier that keeps viewers at somewhat of a distance from the emotional texturing of what is uncovered.
This could be intentional on Popplewell’s part. If intentional, the commentary is likely there in how we only ever Shanann through the filter of her own heavily mediated online existence. Seemingly never without her phone, she streamed everything possible out to the world, from intimate family moments to her life-story narrations about her pre-Chris past (the latter are particularly fragmentary). It’s a buzzy and upbeat presentation that maintains a flatly persistent social-media positivity. In between showing the steady closing in of police interrogators on an increasingly scattered and frightened Chris, Popplewell cuts back to several weeks before Shanann’s disappearance, when she began expressing concern about the relationship. The texts she sends to a friend are a spiral of worry and self-doubt (“I’m over here crying in silence”) which contrasts with the version of herself being presented online.
For Chris’s part, most of what is shown of him is either smiling in a somewhat befuddled manner in Shanann’s high-energy videos or him quietly coming apart at the seams under police pressure. He remains at the end of the movie a question mark. Far more vivid are their two little girls, an adorable and ever-grinning cherubic pair also never seen outside the frame of Shanann’s camera. The missing space left by the three of them makes the police questioning of Chris feel even emptier as it grinds on to a conclusion that is in its broader outline completely foreseeable and in the particulars crushingly sad.
As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments. That ultimate unknowability may have been part of Popplewell’s vision. But if so, it comes close to flattening the presentation of a unique tragedy into something more far more banal. [C+]
