When I'm sleepy I sometimes find my shoulders slumping forwards. I'm sitting at my desk and when I look up, my hands are clutching the sides of my chair to keep myself from falling forward into my laptop. It was exactly this posture in which Joyce Kinney sat throughout her extended interviews, which form the centrepiece of Errol Morris' new film: Tabloid. It's called Tabloid and not Joyce Kinney because the film is about the story of this woman's life, not about the woman herself. Which is probably why she looks so Atlas-y, so tired.

Joyce Kinney has had a very strange life. She kidnapped a Mormon. She upstaged Joan Collins at the premiere of The Stud. She jumped parole dressed as a nun. She had her dog cloned, for $150,000.

Where did she get the money? I don't know.

Did she actually kidnap Kirk the Mormon? Did he go willingly? Was it a bit of both? Don't know either.

The movie is not begging us to buy into any of the three hypotheses which it poses in its opening interview. Which is nice. Perhaps though it is not quite as anti-didactic as it seems to attempt. We cannot help but feel sad for Joyce. She lost the love of her life, whether by fault or misfortune. Maybe inescapable I guess.

And still, the film is full of laughter. Which I think is a strange and imaginative touch from Morris. We are used to his haywire, colourful, collages. The constant gurgling and giggling of the talking heads as they dissect the peculiar tragedies of Joyce Kinney's life add a wierd, Gilliam-esque, macabre to the piece. I like it a lot.

One thing that jumps out is the retreat which Joyce makes, immediately after her brief flirtation with fame. The symmetry is quite astounding. She emerges from rural isolation into the real world; the real world she experiences is a complete catastrophe; she retreats back into rural isolation. Wierd.


Another thing, that I did think about when I was coming to the end of the film was the way that Joyce's parents (or father at least) surfaced and then dissappeared again. It doesn't constitute a loose end, but it made me feel a bit stray, a bit strange. It just made me think that somewhere there, without it being noteworthy, Joyce was orphaned and that she will orphan nobody and that that seems such a thickset footnote.