Keira Knightley stays on the case as scared, intrepid reporter Loretta Laughlin
Boston Strangler (2023)
Streaming on Hulu
Can we still enjoy modest movies? We all hope a movie will stay with us, as light entertainment or serious storytelling. But for that to happen, does it always need to wow us?
Or can a movie settle in our minds without a lot of fuss, providing enough cleverly crafted intrigue to leave us feeling our time hasn’t been wasted?
That’s what we get in Boston Strangler, and I wonder how avidly current audiences will savor its plain pleasures.
Not that it’s a lulling or easy watch. It takes stomaching.
The gruesome subject is the string of horrific murders of women in Boston in the early ’60s that puzzled, exasperated and shocked the country.
At first it was older women, then it gradually became younger ones, women who were raped, tortured and strangled in their apartments.
The assailant, in a maniacally sick touch, signed off by tying their stockings around their necks in a grotesque decorative bow.
It took too long for the police to realize that they had a serial killer on their hands.
It was the women reporters who figured out exactly what had sealed the fate of the female victims.
Ruskin’s script meticulously lays out the vital aspect of the crimes that Laughlin and Cole kept noticing: all the women had freely opened their doors to a stranger.
In this movie’s recounting, the cops were finally clued in by Loretta Laughlin (Keira Knightley), a bored reporter stuck on the Lifestyle desk at the Record American.
The apparently random killings mystify Loretta, and on her own initiative she lays side by side newspaper clippings about the murders from her own and other city papers.
She discovers a pattern. The first three victims were older women living alone who’d opened their doors to a stranger – there was no forced entry – who’d then savagely murdered them.
Laughlin convinces her dubious editor Jack Maclaine (Chris Cooper) to let her write the story.
After it runs, even he is pleased that the police have to admit they’d missed how the three cases were connected.
Was Boston PD grateful? On the contrary.
Pugnacious Police Commissioner McNamara (Bill Camp) storms into Maclaine’s office loudly dismissing what he calls the naive speculations of a “girl reporter”.
He warns Maclaine to back away from the story and let the cops do their work.
The thing was, they were botching it.
Here writer-director Matt Ruskin’s script takes on an intriguing double task, tackling (1) a grisly public spectacle and (2) journalism’s sexism in the early ’60s.
Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) and Loretta Laughlin (Keira Knightley) hunt for a serial killer
Loretta lucks out when she’s joined in her reporting by the wised-up Jean Cole (Carrie Coon).
Cole has done investigative work for the paper and isn’t intimidated by preening male journalists or police, no matter how high they rank.
Ruskin has said that researching these two tenacious women propelled his writing.
Their reporters’ pact, until now only cursorily talked about, inspired him to give what was thought a well-understood true crime tale a fresh spin.
The classic renditions, including a 1968 movie starring Henry Fonda and Tony Curtis, failed to give a fair accounting.
It was the women reporters who figured out exactly what had sealed the fate of the female victims.
Ruskin’s script meticulously lays out the vital aspect of the crimes that Laughlin and Cole kept noticing: all the women had freely opened their doors to a stranger.
He was a softspoken man who falsely claimed that a building superintendent had sent him to check on a problem in their apartments.
The women’s easy credulity at the offhand words of a cunning male was precisely what got them killed.
So, were the murders neatly resolved? No. Not to this day. That’s why the movie isn’t titled “The Boston Strangler”.
That scary designation was applied by the press at the time to sensationally publicized suspect Albert De Salvo, and the cheap thrill wasn’t just too hasty, it was outlandishly wrong.
McLaughlin and Cole learned that killings of women in New York and Michigan bore traits strikingly similar to those in Boston.
Authorities in all three states eventually found 13 cases that fell into a similar pattern.
Yet it was also true that those crimes couldn’t have been the work of a single killer, and DNA evidence has linked only one of the murders to De Salvo.
The other 12 cases remain unsolved.
Two determined women didn’t rest until they brought the convoluted truth to light, and until now their struggle to correct hasty, incomplete press coverage and police work hasn’t been dramatized.
That calls for an earnest new take, and Ruskin and his collaborators do their story justice. His script keeps the revelations low key, as they were in life.
The sad realization for Ruskin as screenwriter was that lives had been lost due to a succession of impulsive guesses.
It took McLaughlin and Cole, as well as the authorities they finally persuaded to look deeper, more than three years to fit the zigzags of the case into a coherent narrative.
Ruskin deserves praise for avoiding sensationalism and staying focused on the roiling instincts of deranged murderers, flummoxed police and weary reporters determined to keep their eyes on the prize.
His cinematographer Ben Kutchins envelops Boston in grey-brown hues that lend an air of bafflement and menace.
The hazily lit murder scenes are shocking and ghastly, but never exploitative.
Anne McCabe’s crisp editing gives the fraught war-of-words among cops, reporters and evasive suspects a hair-trigger urgency.
The acting throughout is confident and controlled. Knightley and Coon make the reporters’ gumption feel urgent but, crucially, they’re never shrill, which is no easy balancing act.
McLaughlin and Cole are either battling men who think they’re not up to the job, or cajoling other men to help them who doubt they’ll ever prove what they’re claiming is true.
Interestingly, the script gives them help from other women, many working at low levels overseeing small but telling pieces of evidence they can share, sometimes at the risk of being fired.
This movie says that getting the unglamorous, dangerous, vital job done is its own reward.
The picture makes a similar case for itself. Cast and crew ask no favors from the audience, and none are required to have a satisfying time watching this gritty expose unfold.
The plea for the middle-of-the-road, fact-laden but niftily executed movie is nicely made here. I think audiences will miss out if they won’t give it a chance.