‘Boston Strangler’ Is No ‘Zodiac,’ But It Still Has Some Juice

It’s certainly a vexing true-life saga: the essentially unsolved crime career of the Boston Strangler, from 1962 to 1964, in which 13 women were killed and for which a single loser, Albert DeSalvo, was arrested and sent to prison, where he was knifed to death in 1973, assailant unknown. Even a Wikipediac acquaintance with the case leaves you gaping and grasping at inconsistencies, primarily DeSalvo’s famous, error-filled, and inadmissible confession; the pernicious participation of celebrity defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey; the possibility of there being more than one Strangler; and the fact that at the time, several Boston men killed inconvenient wives and mistresses using the publicized Strangler-style as camouflage.

The tale reeks of still-kept secrets and official skullduggery, and Hollywood has been there from the outset: Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler, starring Tony Curtis as DeSalvo, came out four years after the last killing, in 1968, and other movies have followed, plus true-crime podcasts and TV policier episodes. This new, Hulu-streaming Boston Strangler takes a refreshing tack, focusing not on the killer or the cops but on the glass-ceilinged female journalists Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) and Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) who first reported, for the Boston Record American, that the initial killings shared an MO and were therefore connected.

You can probably already see this film being made in your head — director Matt Ruskin wants it to be his Zodiac (2007), but it has neither the David Fincher chops nor the expansive running time to make that happen. Ruskin does cop the vibe — the desaturated period tone (the ’60s were apparently the color of tile mold), the forensic gravity, the aggregation of facts and revelations — and far be it for me to deny the basic pleasure of investigative tension, especially when it’s “true.” But you can feel the script tighten like a noose as short rushed scene after scene scraps character details for evidentiary exposition, all to get it in under two hours.

A sprawling human zoo of craggy, heavily textured character actors shuffles in and out of the film like a Boston parade of water buffalo.

As we get info shot at us like Nerf darts, we helplessly start to wonder what really happened, because movies like this require you to hit Wikipedia when they’re through, if not during. Therein lies the other problem: The Boston Strangler case, in reality, is an octopus of inconclusive tangents and unproven theories, and while the film strains to give all the ambiguities air time, it also has McLaughlin and Cole far exceed their real roles, digging up and laying out connections and contradictions that were in fact the product of research done in the 2000s. It’s still juicy stuff, and Ruskin’s strategy certainly has an edge on Fleischer’s film, which, because it was made so early, naively bought into the DeSalvo lone-killer scenario. It’s not true, but Cole and McLaughlin didn’t know that in the ’60s, and neither did anyone else who wasn’t actually involved in the murders. Does it matter? Fincher’s Zodiac never overstepped what was known within the story’s timeframe, and made that grim lack of resolution the film’s primary takeaway.

Hey, you either geek on this kind of thing or you don’t bother watching. Meanwhile, the film centers rather worshipfully on Knightley’s working mom — chin out, high-strung, indefatigable, shocked at being treated like a girl — while Coon’s far savvier Cole seems to be the real heroine, or at least the far more convincing ’60s reporter/working woman. (Though it’s conceivable that Coon, a criminally underused actress still, with a bewitching matter-of-fact gaze and sharp Eve Arden voice, would out-convince Knightley playing anything but an ex-model.)

Better is the sprawling human zoo of craggy, heavily textured character actors shuffling in and out of the film like a Boston parade of water buffalo: Bill Camp’s police commissioner, Chris Cooper’s editor-in-chief, Peter Gerety’s grizzled crime-beat reporter, Robert John Burke’s grumbly publisher, Rory Cochrane’s fed-up detective, Frank Ridley’s super, and so on, a whole herd of corned-beef faces that summon memories of the background casts in old Sidney Lumet movies. Most of them get one scene each, but in toto, they make more of an impression than Alessandro Nivola’s exasperated lead detective or poor David Dastmalchian, already typecast for his demonic glower, as DeSalvo.

It’s a diverting enough package, but only if you consider the Googling rabbit hole you’ll fall into afterward as an integral part of the genre’s make-up. As you should.  ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

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