The strange case of Aaron Hernandez — the pro football player convicted of murder before dying by suicide — may be the least eye-opening illumination of a slaying ever committed to film.
On a police-procedural level, the events of the past decade explain how the NFL star brazenly walked the edge of murderous madness, making him perhaps pro football’s first serial killer (O.J. was nothing more than a jealous ex).
What remains as mysterious as pi’s square root is why. Hernandez never confessed to all the murders, and hanged himself shortly after the conviction for one. Still, he’s such a mystery that he’ll be the subject of two mini-series this month: Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and Aaron Hernandez: An ID Murder Mystery premiere Jan. 15 and Jan. 20, respectively, on Netflix and Investigation Discovery. As non-fiction films, both are hindered by the sport’s cavalier attitude toward violence — a rein that prevents both series from galloping.
What both unwittingly uncover, however, is how football does more than shrug at violence. It holds an inherit machismo obsession that creates the very cauldron of violence from which criminals emerge (Simpson, Jim Brown, Michael Vick, anyone? The list is frighteningly long.)
Neither, however, clearly answers the singular question at hand: What prompted a young man with seemingly boundless opportunities to throw his life away?
Instead of an answer, what viewers get are plenty of salacious but conflicting details, which don’t bring us much closer to understanding why.
Netflix’s Killer Inside makes a more valiant effort to find the truth, at least in terms of probing causes of his behavior. Investigation Discovery follows with Murder Mystery, a more dutiful tick-tock of the criminal trial (its primary sources are journalists who followed the case), complete with the usual cheesy reenactments — a tactic that Killer Inside also employs, just a bit more judiciously.
A star athlete in Bristol, Connecticut, Hernandez grew up with a stern father who also played football, becoming a standout in high school and at Florida before being signed by the New England Patriots.
Small wonder that widespread shock greeted the news in 2013 when Hernandez was charged, and later convicted, in the murder of Odin Lloyd, the 27-year-old boyfriend of his fiancee’s sister, and subsequently accused of a separate double homicide.
With a $40 million NFL contract and an outwardly enviable existence, as a friend says, “None of it made sense.”
Both programs try, mostly in vain, to make sense of it, contemplating a host of potential contributing factors, the most serious being CTE, the brain injury caused by repetitive contact that has plagued many football players.
As Killer Inside (and what’s with the unimaginative title? Why not Killer in the Huddle?) makes clear, the league’s emphasis is on protecting its multibillion-dollar product, as opposed to promoting the health and safety of players. Those conflicting goals prevent a full-throated discussion of the dangers.
Other motivations, however, are raised, in some respects undermining — or distracting from — that central thesis. They include the assertion that Hernandez was conflicted about his sexuality, particularly with a high school friend and teammate, Dennis SanSoucie.
Hernandez’s brother, Jonathan, also later spoke about abuse by their father, who died when Aaron was just 16, which resulted in a rift between Aaron and his mother.
In terms of the presentation, the most illuminating wrinkle in Killer Inside involves having access to audio of phone calls Hernandez made from prison, providing modest insight about his post-arrest state of mind and relationships with those closest to him.
For all that, these overlapping documentaries yield an inconclusive portrait. While there’s a tendency to indict football, at every level, for exploiting young talent, there are so many variables baked into Hernandez’s particular tale as to muddy that message.
The Aaron Hernandez story thus remains a tragedy that has defied, and continues to, simple explanation. While documentaries frequently connect their subjects to larger truths, Aaron Hernandez and Killer Inside ultimately feel at least as preoccupied, to varying degrees, with wading through its smaller tabloid trappings.
Both of the films’ ultimate failures are captured in one of Hernandez’s phone calls, taped by prison officials. In it, Hernandez refuses to say goodbye to his daughter, only “talk to you later.” He then discontinues the call, marked by an automated operator that says “The calls hung up.”
In 2019, Netflix scored its first Oscar nomination for best picture. A year later, the streaming service is leading the field in total nominations.
Movies released by Netflix earned 24 nominations this year, nearly doubling its all-time total. Leading the way for the company this year are The Irishman and Marriage Story, which earned 10 and 6 nominations, respectively—including best picture nods for both. As Netflix’s impact on the world of cinema becomes increasingly undeniable, the younger and more diverse film academy is no longer shunning the streaming service as the old Hollywood guard tried to do.
In addition to its two best picture nominations, the haul from Netflix, which released its first feature in 2015, reached virtually every category, from acting (where it received seven nominations) to writing to visual effects.
Netflix’s 24 nominations were two more than Disney’s total, even when combining all of the nominations earned by Disney’s various studios into a single number. (Disney’s empire now includes 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight.)
2020 Oscar nominations, by film studio:
Netflix
24 nominations
Disney
22
Sony
20
Universal
13
Warner Bros.
12
Counting its two best picture nominations, the haul from Netflix, which released its first feature in 2015, reached virtually every category, from acting (where it received seven nominations) to writing to visual effects.
Netflix’s 24 nominations were two more than Disney’s total, even when combining all of the nominations earned by Disney’s various studios into a single number. (Disney’s empire now includes 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight.)
Threatened by the implications of Netflix’s arrival on the film scene, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the industry professionals who vote on the Oscars—had resisted awarding the streaming service with nominations. Hollywood has not been pleased with Netflix’s decision to release most of its films to subscribers online the same day that they’re put in theaters, which challenges the century-old relationship between distributors and theater owners. Nor are they happy with the small number of theaters that Netflix does allow its movies to be screened in.
But now voters are clearly warming to the idea of internet flicks, and we are entering the third age of television; streaming.
Though film viewers might not be in movie theaters, more people are seeing these films than if they were given a traditional theatrical release. Director Martin Scorsese—as Hollywood as Hollywood gets—said that he wouldn’t have been able to make The Irishman with a traditional studio. The major studios were unwilling to take on the financial risk of the three-hour mob drama, the director said. The deep-pocketed Netflix, however, was more than game, since it didn’t have box office receipts to worry about.
Netflix has used those deep pockets to launch historically expensive Oscar campaigns, hoping to woo voters the old-school way, with lavish parties and elaborate advertisements. The result has been an annual increase in Oscar nominations for the streaming service:
Helping Netflix’s case is a voting pool that has grown more diverse in recent years, in reaction to controversies like #OscarsSoWhite. In 2016, after the second consecutive year of an all-white slate of acting nominees, the academy made a much-publicized effort to invite more women and minority members. These new members, many of whom hail from outside the United States, are probably Netflix users themselves and can understand the appeal of releasing a film to everyone in the world at the same time.
While it may have helped Netflix ingratiate itself among the Hollywood elite, the change in membership hasn’t adequately addressed the actual problem it was meant to correct. The acting nominations this year were still blatantly homogeneous. Nineteen of the 20 nominees were white. The only black nominee, Cynthia Erivo, was nominated for portraying the former slave and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. As usual, all five directing nominees were men.
That’s another area where Netflix can help the industry improve. The service has championed Oscar-worthy films directed by diverse filmmakers or ones featuring diverse casts, like 2017’s Mudbound and this year’s dramedy, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. Dolemite Is My Name was not nominated for any Oscars, even though its costume designer, Ruth E. Carter, became the first black designer to win an Oscar in history last year.
Netflix’s record nominations total is only going to convince even more talented filmmakers that the streaming service is a smart place to take their films. A world in which a majority of nominated films are distributed by Netflix and other streaming services may not be so far off.
It must be Oscar time, because suddenly Hollywood’s credulity is in question. Again.
This is an old refrain the final months leading up to the Academy Awards, which are annually inundated with biopics and historical epics, all vying for statuettes. This year’s favorite accuracy arguments concern popes and the press. Clint Eastwood was pilloried for his attack on the media in his drama Richard Jewell, and Netflix’s Oscar hopeful The Two Popes earned the ridicule of some papal purists who considered the Fernando Meirelles film inaccurate and dumbed-down for commercial audience. (Full disclosure, I also railed about Jewell, though for personal reasons).
To my fellow film critics, I ask: Shouldn’t we be as diligent “truth squadding” movies the other eight months of the year? Either that, or accept Oscar fare as pure entertainment, as we do with, say, summer movies? To hold a film to a higher threshold of accuracy because of its release date is not only unfair to directors; it’s inaccurate for readers and viewers.
The truth is, in 15 years of movie reporting and reviewing, I have never interviewed a feature film director much concerned with getting the facts straight in any “based on a true story” (BOTS) film. Documentary film directors are a different lot (particularly Werner Herzog), though make no mistake: They edit footage with the same intention as their feature film counterparts — to tell a compelling story.
But from Chris Nolan (Dunkirk) to Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) to Eastwood, details have always taken a backseat to drama. Without exception, directors promoting their BOTS films have told me that their jobs aren’t to teach history (if anything, studios consider that box office death). Instead, they say, their job is to accurately capture the tableau of emotions that spring from that history (directors love the word zeitgeist). Even Tom Hanks, who played the titular role in the much-maligned Somali pirate film Captain Phillips, told me he was drawn to the role because it captured the strains of living life at sea, not the subtleties.
That “capture-the-essence” approach isn’t likely to change anytime soon, particularly given the success of two films this weekend at the Golden Globes, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In both cases, the directors took on based-on-true stories, but with approaches starkly different from competing filmmakers.
In 1917, the fictional story of two World War I soldiers racing to prevent a suicide march, director Sam Mendes ended the movie with a postscript that said the film was dedicated to his grandfather, WWI vet Alfred Hubert Mendes, who told his family that story innumerable times.
Quentin Tarantino, who directed Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, went even further. He loves to wreak havoc with historical accounts. In Inglorious Basterds, he ends the film with the heroes killing Hitler in an eruption of bullets and flames.
He did something similar in Hollywood, taking the real-life horror of the Charles Manson slayings and giving viewers the visceral ending they would have preferred (and get in most other straight-up features).
Their strategy worked like a Swiss watch. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association showered both movies in awards. 1917 won Golden Globe for best drama and director, while Hollywood took best comedy or musical and best screenplay for Tarantino. Popes, The Irishman and Jewell were all but forgotten.
Even holding a BOTS film’s feet to the fact-fire seems silly. What effective entertainment, on some level, isn’t based on a truth? Just as all music draws from notes that have been played before, so too are the reductive themes in film. Star Wars is essentially a father-son story. Casablanca is about love during wartime. You can’t copyright feelings.
Hollywood executives even go out of their way to point out a film’s factual failings — as long as it’s from another studio. Harvey Weinstein was renown for knocking the veracity of other studios’ BOTS movies. I can’t count how many publicists whispered under the breath when I asked about a competing biopic or historical portrait, ‘I hear it’s not a bad movie. Too bad it’s not true.’
So if Hollywood isn’t going to change its ways, perhaps we need to. Both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketma, for example, are rife with inaccuracies in portrayals of their subjects, Freddie Mercury and Elton John, respectively. But Rhapsody, which came out during Oscar season 2018, drew much more rigorous examination than Rocketman, released this summer. To scrutinize one but not the other implies one has accuracy issues, becoming in itself a journalistic inaccuracy.
Perhaps the answer is to treat BOTS films the way we treat political rallies, which are eerily similar: both take liberties with facts to win favor with a largely dim-witted crowd that won’t bother to look up facts on their own.
So the job falls to us to watch “true stories” with a boulder-sized grain of salt and the assumption they will require some fact-checking. Who knows? It may even improve our film reviews, a sidebar comparing fact to fiction.
It’s time we decide whether we’re going to treat these films as reporters or audience members. We need to regard BOTS films for what they really are: not a kiddie pool of facts, but a diving board into deeper knowledge. Hollywood films are just the divining rods.
Movie critics already have fallen out of the fact-finding business. Maybe it’s time we work some muscle memory.
