This Woman’s Work

My Thoughts on Boston Strangler

The last couple of years have seen an influx of true crime narratives in which the stories under investigation are spread out over the course of multiple episodes. Sometimes the results are engrossing but in too many cases, you come away from them with the sense that the makers could have conveyed everything they had to say within the parameters of a conventional feature length and left the other stuff behind. In the case of Boston Strangler, the reverse is true—it is a conventional feature film (albeit one premiering on Hulu instead of in theaters) and a decent enough one, I suppose, but when it was all over, I found myself feeling that this was a story that might have benefitted from a long-form treatment.

For those too young to recall, the Boston Strangler was the name given to the person who murdered 13 women in the Boston area during the early Sixties, crimes which proved especially frustrating to police because the killer seemed to have an innate ability to get his victims to allow him into their apartments. The crimes were eventually attributed to a man named Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to committing them after being arrested for another incident of sexual assault. Since there was no physical evidence at the time connecting him to the murders, he was charged with numerous other crimes and sentenced to life in prison, where he was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant in 1973. (In 2013, his DNA was found to be a match with fluid found at the scene of the Strangler’s final victim.) The notoriety surrounding the crimes seeped into popular culture via the 1968 film The Boston Strangler, a factually dubious take on the case that featured Tony Curtis in one of his most effective performances as DeSalvo, and The Rolling Stones classic “Midnight Rambler.”

While that previous film focused primarily on DeSalvo’s crimes and the police investigation that led to his capture, Boston Strangler utilizes an approach closer to the great Zodiac to tell its tale. The focus this time is on Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley), a reporter for the Boston Record-American who is tired of being stuck in the lifestyle section writing articles about new toasters and who wants to prove her mettle as a real reporter. After sniffing out the fact that a number of recent grisly and seemingly unconnected murders in the area have similarities that the cops have apparently failed to pick up on, she convinces her editor (Chris Cooper) to let her look into it, though he eventually insists, after her first article receives sharp criticism from the police, that she team up with another reporter, Jean Cole (Carrie Coon).

As the body count rises as the police seem almost insanely determined to recognize what is going on around them—even ignoring information sent to them from other cities about crimes they have seen with similarities to what is happening in Boston—and spend more time coming out against these uppity women reporters who are making them look bad than in doing anything of substance to protect the citizens of the city. Loretta is able to make a connection with disillusioned homicide detective Jim Conley (Alessandro Nivola) that leads to getting valuable information for her stories. Eventually, the police announce that they have apprehended DeSalvo (David Dastmalchian) and that he has confessed to the crimes, closing the book on a particularly horrifying chapter of Boston history.

Or does it? While everyone else is content to say that they have finally caught the boogey man and put everything behind them, Loretta and Jean are not so sure—there are a lot of details that don’t quite add up, such as the fact that DeSalvo was apparently out of town at the time of some of the earlier killings—and they are compelled to keep sniffing around. Eventually, startling discoveries are made that put the official version of the story in doubt but they struggle to convince anyone of their suspicions or of their horrifying implications.

To be sure, a lot of Boston Strangler is quite good. I am always a sucker for a film giving a nuts-and-bolts look at journalists doggedly pursuing a story and writer-director Matt Ruskin certainly gives us a strong, straightforward take on the genre, focusing on how Loretta and Jean meticulously pursued the story and defended their work against higher-ups who would prefer to shut the whole thing down rather than risk upsetting the police. It also does a good job of depicting the casual sexism of the era and the ways in which the two found themselves struggling to be take seriously by people whose dismissal of their work based solely on their gender may have helped lead to several deaths. The film also admirably avoids a couple of mistakes that others might have made. For one, it does not lean too heavily on extended and overly graphic reenactments of the murders, a smart call that allows it to avoid coming across like mere exploitation, as was the case with the recent miniseries on Jeffrey Dahmer. Perhaps almost as important, it does not have Keira Knightley attempting to do a Boston accent. This is not to say that she couldn’t pull one off if she tried, but even in a best-case scenario (and that is rarely the case when approximating Boston accents are involved), it would have proven to be a distraction. Sure, she may sound a bit out of place at first but after a few minutes, you will be too swept up in the strength and determination of her performance, especially in her byplay with the equally strong Coon, to notice or care.

The problem with Boston Strangler is that between serving as a reenactment of the case and its investigation, a corrective to the popular narrative enshrined by the earlier movie and an examination of two women who ended up serving as true trailblazers when all they were trying to do was their jobs, there is almost too much going on for its own good. Ruskin does an interesting job of letting the details of the story play out in a quiet and measured manner while keeping the overall pace moving along briskly enough. After a while, though, there are so many characters and details thrown into the mix that they barely have time to breathe (no pun intended) and I found myself wishing that more time had been spent on them in order to give a fuller picture. (The stuff involving Loretta’s home life with her initially supportive and later dismissive husband, which is easily the weakest element of the film, might have seemed like less of a distraction at a longer length.) There are also some unfortunate time compressions of the narrative, especially involving DeSalvo’s imprisonment (including an escape and recapture that isn’t even mentioned) and eventual death, that were no doubt necessary in order to get to a reasonable running time but which end up ringing hollow, especially in the service of a film designed to serve as a repudiation of the factually questionable efforts of previous takes on the story.

Boston Strangler is still a pretty good movie, especially if you have a taste for true crime narratives. It is well-produced, reasonably gripping and contains a number of impressive performances across the board. However, as good as it is at times, I came away from it thinking that a better and fuller presentation of the story and the issues it raises might have been possible had it been presented at a longer length.  I don’t say this lightly because we all know that too many movies these days are too long as it is but if we can all sit through the super-extended likes of gibberish like Avatar, The Way of Water,  surely we could have accepted a little more of this.