An intriguing and intensely personal documentary series chronicling a documentary film-maker's obsessive struggle with chasing the truth of his mother's brutal murder in a quiet and relatively affluent town in America. What hooked me in is the same thing that alienated me about the project ultimately - and that is - WHO IS MADISON HAMBURG?
We're dunked in cold, there's no real context for the investigation and it leaves the viewer having to piece together not just the narrative of the murder or the fragments of the backstory but the intent and nature of the project. Sometimes it even drifts from one "phase" of filming to another and then back again without making it clear that time has passed. In its well-worn twisting investigative narratives and occasional awkward lurches into heavy-handed melodrama it reminded me far too much of the gloriously underrated mockumentary series "American Vandal" but it really failed to hold a mirror up to the author which even the satirical Vandal knew was a vital part of the format.
The more we looked at his sister, his aunts, his grandmother even his evasive and distant father - the less we seemed to see of Madison - or his team. They seemed to be in this production office, and once, a girlfriend drifts in at night to sit with him - but his desperate desire and expectation of honesty from his father, from the local police, doesn't extend to him at all. There are throwaway references to him having been a serious drug user, that he was living away from his mum at the time of her murder, and very occasionally he might look at the camera and say things like "wait, is what I'm doing really just all for this doc? Do I even care about these people at all?" and the unseen producers brush it off. No, you're just a selfless son who loved his mother. This is for her, it's not about you. It is about him though - almost as much if not more about him than it is about her and it's a very strange thing to deny it.
Truthfully I think it does cross some lines - and with a lack of insight into the behind-the-scenes (or the funding) makes it seem more of a cynical project than perhaps it means to be. A solid start for a first-time filmmaker but as a narrative it needs structure more than it does closure.
We're dunked in cold, there's no real context for the investigation and it leaves the viewer having to piece together not just the narrative of the murder or the fragments of the backstory but the intent and nature of the project. Sometimes it even drifts from one "phase" of filming to another and then back again without making it clear that time has passed. In its well-worn twisting investigative narratives and occasional awkward lurches into heavy-handed melodrama it reminded me far too much of the gloriously underrated mockumentary series "American Vandal" but it really failed to hold a mirror up to the author which even the satirical Vandal knew was a vital part of the format.
The more we looked at his sister, his aunts, his grandmother even his evasive and distant father - the less we seemed to see of Madison - or his team. They seemed to be in this production office, and once, a girlfriend drifts in at night to sit with him - but his desperate desire and expectation of honesty from his father, from the local police, doesn't extend to him at all. There are throwaway references to him having been a serious drug user, that he was living away from his mum at the time of her murder, and very occasionally he might look at the camera and say things like "wait, is what I'm doing really just all for this doc? Do I even care about these people at all?" and the unseen producers brush it off. No, you're just a selfless son who loved his mother. This is for her, it's not about you. It is about him though - almost as much if not more about him than it is about her and it's a very strange thing to deny it.
Truthfully I think it does cross some lines - and with a lack of insight into the behind-the-scenes (or the funding) makes it seem more of a cynical project than perhaps it means to be. A solid start for a first-time filmmaker but as a narrative it needs structure more than it does closure.