The documentary “Tabloid” shows that an oddball lead character and a smirky style do not necessarily add up to a complete movie.
Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of “The Fog of War” and “The Thin Blue Line,” retraces a wacky story from the 1970s with the eager cooperation of its central figure, a former Miss Wyoming named Joyce McKinney. Engaged to a Mormon who dumped her at the altar, she pursued him all the way to England. There, she and a male friend allegedly kidnapped the Mormon and took him to a country cottage where she is said to have tied him down and forced herself on him sexually while he protested that it was all a sin.
Her version is that her ex-fiancé was a willing participant in all this, but reluctantly testified against her at the behest of senior Mormons. She became a figure of fun in the British press, found herself invited to the London premiere of “Saturday Night Fever” and was kissed by Keith Moon — then sneaked out of the country in disguise while posing as a deaf-mute.
Oh, and the British rags came up with naughty pictures of her in S & M gear that she says were faked.
Thirty years later, she made the papers again when doctors cloned her pit bull, Booger, in South Korea. That’s pretty much it.
While McKinney is an entertaining narrator and, um, a mistress of the sound bite, her accomplice died in 2004 and the Mormon man didn’t agree to be interviewed, so this unreliable narrator is all the director has. The movie (which informs us at the end that British authorities never pursued extradition after she fled the UK) busily dresses up every anecdote with campy tabloid-style graphics, but leaves many questions unanswered. It finally trickles to a close without ever giving us a great reason for its existence. McKinney would make for a formidable dinner-party guest, though.