Uncredible witnesses to their own lives

The Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight is proof positive that an interesting story does not always make a good documentary.

I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that even the world’s best documentarian can make a good movie out of boring material, although it would probably be a watchable one. You’d think the reverse would be more likely to be true, and in case I’m confusing things too much, I mean that it seems more likely that even a bad filmmaker could make a good documentary out of a story that’s interesting. Abducted in Plain Sight returns the opposite verdict.

I’m not going to say Skye Borgman is a bad filmmaker, but, well …

One of the biggest problems about it was that I did not believe that the interview subjects were credible witnesses to their own lives.

I’ll stop here to issue a SPOILER ALERT, because what’s good about the movie is totally a function of its surprises. If filmmaking itself were something that could be spoiled, I wouldn’t hesitate to spoil it in this case.

The movie is about a young girl, Jan Broberg, who made headlines in the mid-1970s for twice being kidnapped by her neighbor, Bob Berchtold, a family friend who was also in love with her. She was 12 when it started, but it went on for a good five years, somehow, with all sorts of weird bits mixed in. The weird bits include that this neighbor also had sexual relationships with both her mother and her father, though I can’t tell if the relationship with the father ever extended beyond a single hand job in a car. Then there’s also the bit about the neighbor telling the girl that aliens were speaking to her through an intercom and that the two of them needed to have a baby that would save the world from destruction. That’s pretty weird.

The weirdest bit, though, is almost certainly the fact that the girl’s parents did almost nothing to stop it, and in fact, in some cases, had their own sexual relationships with the man after he had already been accused of abducting their daughter. Their own voluntary sexual relationships.

This is just one of many things that make them unreliable narrators, as it were.

I suppose if things had gone in a more expected direction for this type of situation, it would not be the interesting story that it is. It’s interesting because the parents were so totally duped by this guy (who they confusingly just call “Berchtold”) that they seem to abdicate all of their responsibilities as parents and adults. The film argues that this is just how charming “Berchtold” was, but it doesn’t back it up with enough evidence. They just seem like weirdos who do inexplicable things for reasons you, and quite likely they, can’t quite fathom.

It’s truly odd to watch interviews with her parents and have them confess to certain behaviors without really trying to explain why they did what they did. What’s more, we hear audio tapes from the time where they are speaking to their daughter – presumed missing at this point, and only about 15 years old – where they ask her questions about whether “Berchtold” still wants to marry her and whether she still wants to marry him. Almost like they were disinterested work acquaintances rather than, you know, her parents.

The other strange thing about the film is that it unceremoniously introduces the adult Jan Broberg as one of the interview subjects from the very beginning of the film. She looks quite composed and well-adjusted, if perhaps maintaining a little of the apparent naivete she would have had back then. But the fact that she’s smiling and looks nicely put together immediately defuses the idea, at least on a surface level, that she might have been scarred by being abducted and raped by her neighbor, in addition to removing any doubt as to whether she actually survived the events in question, which might have been kept vague by a more shrewd filmmaker.

The whole film has the feeling of starting in the middle of a sentence, like it doesn’t fully introduce us to the characters or lay the groundwork about why their story is worth telling. Of course, the argument could be made that any story of a child twice abducted by the same person is worth telling, but because we don’t know the details at the start, it feels like some kind of introductory voice was required to prepare us for why we are meeting these people and learning their story. Borgman heaps too much of the responsibility for bringing us up to speed on the Broberg family themselves, five of whom are interviewed, all of whom are too close to the material to give us something like the omniscient overview we need before getting into the story.

The other decision the film makes is to rely heavily on recreations. It’s not that the quality of the recreations is bad – it’s actually pretty good. But it’s such a consistent part of the storytelling approach that it tends to remind us of its artificiality and of what creative leeway we are allowing Borgman.

I suspect that some of my perspective is problematic, because these are ordinary human beings who went through extraordinary events, so it’s not a huge surprise their testimony seems to be filled with holes. The human memory is fallible, and it seems all the more fallible when it’s not supported by what we would consider logical human behavior.

But I also have to say that if you are watching a movie, and listening to people speak, and feeling like you want to shake them because they did so many things that defied explanation, it does affect your ability to enjoy the movie. You are taken out of it because you don’t believe them. You don’t believe anyone could act this way and then offer only the lame explanations they are offering today.

I often say that I prefer true sports stories to made-up sports stories, because the incredible feats depicted in them have an air of believability as a result of having really happened. If a screenwriter dreamed up that unlikely comeback, I would never have believed it, but if it really happened I’ve got no choice. You could say the same thing about documentaries of real people whom you couldn’t believe if they were fictitious characters. But what if you don’t believe them even when they’re real?