O.J. SIMPSON: MADE IN AMERICA (Ezra Edelman, U.S.). 464 minutes. April 30, 12:30 pm, TIFF 4. Episode One (90 minutes) also screens April 29, 6:30 pm, Bloor Hot Docs, with talk by Edelman, Robert Lipsyte and a special guest as part of the Big Ideas series. Rating: NNNN
Why are we still talking about O.J. Simpson?
It’s been almost 22 years since the ex-NFL star and occasional actor allegedly murdered his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Mezzaluna waiter Ron Goldman, and it’s like he’s never gone away.
The FX event series American Crime Story: The People V. O.J. Simpson turned his 1995 double-murder trial into an all-star kabuki performance, examining the trial’s effect through the double prism of celebrity impersonation and Kardashian fixation.
American Crime Story put the Juice back into the news cycle. But now it’s time for a corrective, which Hot Docs is supplying in the form of Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary O.J. Simpson: Made In America.
Produced in five 90-minute segments for ESPN but screening at Hot Docs in a seven-and-a-half-hour marathon Saturday (April 30), it’s the most comprehensive inquiry yet attempted into Simpson and the world that made him possible.
Yes, it’s really long. It has to be. Edelman uses pacing as a narrative tool, shaping the story in deliberate movements. The first section spends a lot of time establishing the shameful history of race relations in Los Angeles so we can understand Simpson’s savvy marketing of himself as a post-racial celebrity when he played for the USC Trojans in the late 60s.
He told any sportscaster who’d listen that race didn’t matter on the gridiron, only athletic ability. Off the field, he set himself apart from the black community that revered him and pursued friendships with Hollywood’s rich and connected. Multiple friends recall him explaining, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” – a mantra he’d be quick to abandon at his murder trial, where his Dream Team defence realized that the race card (with a largely black jury) was their best path to an acquittal.
The third and fourth segments of Made In America are taken up with the murder and trial, obviously the three most powerful hours in the documentary.
They are also the most brutal: crime-scene photos are more graphic and upsetting than anything I’d ever seen released elsewhere. But it’s essential that we comprehend the violence of the crime. Sadly, it’s not enough to be told that Nicole Brown Simpson was nearly decapitated by one of the knife strikes. We have to see it. We have to understand the force. This wasn’t a robbery gone wrong or an accident this was a rage killing, and a deeply personal one.
Maybe that’s the other reason the Simpson case still carries so much cultural weight: it serves as a nexus for everything that isn’t right with the world. The awful reality of the Simpsons’ marriage – a battered woman left unprotected by an indifferent police force and further victimized after her murder by a clumsy prosecution and Simpson’s craven attorneys – points to a stacked legal system that abusers continue to exploit two decades later.
And the split between whites who couldn’t believe Simpson had been acquitted and blacks who saw the verdict as a desperately needed victory after the Rodney King beating echoes in the response to today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
All of these things are given the time to echo in the viewer’s mind as Made In America lays out its story, speaking with the voices of Simpson’s friends and associates as well as the police, prosecutors and defence attorneys from his various trials, including the civil case that found him liable for the murders and delivered a $33.5 million judgment to the families of his victims. They’ll never see it.
Absent, of course, is O.J. himself. He is currently in a Nevada prison, serving time for felonies committed during a 2007 robbery in Las Vegas.
I don’t believe he’ll be missed. As Edelman makes very clear, O.J. Simpson works a lot better as a symbol than a human being.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
