Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart

If you liked Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line", you'll like Jeremiah Zagof's "Captivated." It's not as neatly organized, nor as convincing, but it's intelligent and it will involve all of your mental faculties that yearn to make judgments.

In the early 90s, a pretty young woman named Pamela Smart was convicted of enlisting the help of a couple of fifteen-year-old kids in helping to murder her husband. She was sentenced to life without. The kids plea bargained their way out after confessing that they'd shot the husband. Two of the four are out already, two are eligible next year.

It was described by some as another "trial of the century" and turned into a media frenzy. According to this documentary, no one who was awake at all could have escaped the progress of the trial. I must have slept through the 90s but I'm persuaded that the case did get a great deal of media attention. There were two movies made about it. A docudrama called "Murder in New Hampshire," with Helen Hunt as the vamp, and a fictionalized version, "To Die For," with Nicole Kidman, who looks absolutely exquisite and delivers what may be her best performance. But just because we see events through selective captures doesn't necessarily establish the truth value of the events.

Pamela Smart has been doing her time in a facility in New York state, where the other inmates brutalized her and the corrections officers raped her and forced her to pose for salacious photos, which they then sold to tabloid newspapers -- or so she and some fellow inmates claim.

The simple fact is that practically no one in this film can be trusted to tell the truth, partly because of the media. An example: The judge in the case refused to permit a change of venue, although if ever one were needed it would seem to be here. Why did he refuse? It was a high-profile case and when they wrote the books and made the movies about it, he would be a MOVIE STAR. (He suggested he be played by Gregory Peck.) Everybody involved in the case would be a celebrity, one way or another.

The lies and distortions abound. People contradict their earlier statements, deny their own actions, and describe others as different from the people we see in the film. Pamela Smart, now a flinty looking blond in her forties, sees herself as having been demure and puzzled, as well as innocent. But there's a clip of her in the courtroom. The victim's father is speaking his piece after the verdict, sobbing as he reads his notes, and she leaps to her feet and begins shouting viciously back at him.

The difference between "Captivated" and "The Thin Blue Line" isn't just in the level of expertise shown in the editing, or the fact that "Blue Line" led eventually to the release of Randall Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a patrolman. "Captivated" is less interested in the details of the murder than in the media blitz surrounding the trial. No celebrity attended Randall Adams when he was railroaded, but the Pamela Smart case had sex in it, and a deviant kind of sex, a 22-year-old pretty woman and a couple of horny but stupid high schoolers. The public evidently salivated over the spectacle. Smart was beautiful, sexy, and popular -- enough in itself to make many other women hate her and envy her. The male spectators probably envied the kids.

The main theme is laudable. Not "she's innocent" but "the media contaminates what it examines." Every high-profile case is like carrying out a serious operation before the germ theory was accepted. You know, unwashed bare hands that five minutes earlier were dissecting a corpse? The problem is that the film doesn't have a real narrative trajectory. There are plenty of talking heads -- some of them making sense, others making fools of themselves -- and many of the points hit the target. What normal man WOULDN'T want to be played by Gregory Peck?

The director is rather too obviously trying to convince us that Pamela Smart had nothing to do with the murder. I was persuaded that the jury, the witnesses, the talking heads, and the public at large, were made up of ordinary, flawed human beings, and that justice in this case is a matter of probabilities, as it usually is. He'd been better off to applying the Heisenberg principle to the new coverage in the courtroom: You can't poke a camera into an event without having the participants react to the camera.

Technically, Zagar borrows a lot from "The Thin Blue Line" but renders it a bit more flashy. Multiple shots of a small tape recorder playing, while we listen to a recorded statement, only this time, instead of one magnetic, static image, the camera slowly circles the indifferent recorder. The minimalist musical score could have been written by my main man, Phillip Glass, described as "doodle doodle doodle".

I have to hand it to HBO, though, for undertaking some tough jobs in making these specials. One of the oases of taste and ambition in the Sahara desert that is television.

Although this was interesting enough to give it 5 stars out of 10, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief more times than I could count at the blatant bias towards Pam's 'possible' innocence throughout the vast majority of the film. I agree that any trial that becomes a media circus does not have the feel of being a 'fair' trial, but after seeing and hearing the evidence that was presented in court, I would have no doubt voted for guilty myself. This would be based on Pam's own words as much as anything else. I also think it is insulting to the jurors who voted for guilty to presume that their decision was entirely affected by all the media coverage. So, if you watch this, I suggest doing so with a grain of salt.

Jeremiah Zagar's HBO documentary tells the story of the high-profile New Hampshire trial and conviction of Pamela Smart, the accused murderer of Gregg Smart (her husband) in 1990. The film is packed with interviews—which includes: Smart herself, family, friends, accused conspirators, authors, reporters, and others—and does a pretty good job of letting the viewer choose who to believe. Right from the get-go, the film's main interest is how the notorious media coverage may have interfered with Smart's right to a fair trial, and Zagar not only never lets up but actually keeps pushing the issue harder and harder as the film progresses, making itself as sensationalistic as the subjects it's criticizing. Still, very intriguing and quite education for those who were not around or do not remember the hype of it all in the early-'90s.

*** (out of four)

Well made, well paced documentary. The whole mob mentality humans get into is disgusting and pitiful.

While this documentary purports to be interested Solee and media bias and how it impacts trials, the real Takeaway is that Pamela smart managed to do yet another person, the director. What does make this documentary fascinating is how it shows footage rarely seen since the original trial itself. Unfortunately at glosses over several incredibly damaging pieces of evidence against Pam and instead tries to paint the boys in as bad a light as possible. The most damning moment of this occurs when the prosecution is presenting the transcript I hope the wire taps to the jury. Instead of really allowing the viewer to get a sense of what the transcript shows, the narration talks over the presentation. But you will be wise to pause the screen with the blown up transcript in front of the jury. Read the transcript and you'll have no doubt why the jury convicted this woman. Pamela and her one or two supporters, despite all of their whining, have never will never and can never explain away Pam's words on that wire tap. It's the proverbial smoking gun and that's why she will never be released from prison When Pama says, among many other things, that "if we tell the truth were all going to end up in the effing slammer," or "Who are they going to believe me a college educated professional or a bunch of no good loser high school students, she sealed her fate". Not to mention the fact that, when I asked point blank on the wiretap why she didn't get a divorce, and specifically that she knew about the plot to kill her husband before it happened, Pamela answered "yes I did know." How the director can overlook such blatantly obvious guilty admissions is beyond me. It completely undermines any credibility he has and leaves this documentary will be short.