Blue Caprice is a drama inspired by the 2002 DC sniper attacks starring Isaiah Washington as John Allen Muhammad and Tequan Richmond as Lee Malvo. I actually remember what it felt like to wonder if you were next or if statistics would work in my favor because I visited DC a couple times that year. Fair or not, I compare all serial killer movies to the TV movie, The Deliberate Stranger, starring Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy because it made a huge impression on me as a child. I have no idea if it would have the same hold on me if I rewatched it now. Bundy was the first serial killer that I remembered because “Dr.” Dobson interviewed him on the radio, and I equated Harmon with Bundy even though the casting was overly flattering to Bundy’s ego since he was not that attractive. That TV movie could have been a pulpy, true crime mess, but it is the metric by which I measure all other killer movies.
Unfortunately Blue Caprice comes up short though it has a completely different take on the genre so my reception of the movie is innately unfair. Blue Caprice is a coming of age story shot in an independent film style more reminiscent of foreign than American films and falls in the middle of The Snowtown Murders, which had a realistic, dingy style, and Nobody Knows, which made the ugly beautiful and kept the harshest reality at a respectful arm’s length. Because it is an American film, and I as an American viewer was expecting an American take on the story, I came wanting a more accurately detailed film that is more like a recreation from Unsolved Mysteries without Robert Culp than a thoughtful meditation on a teenage boy’s cultivation by a paternal psychological abuser and what that looks like if it is an ordinary part of life. I did not know that a French director, Alexandre Moors, made this movie, which was his first feature film.
Blue Caprice opens with archival news footage and audio from the 911 calls, which further sets up wrong expectations of what this movie’s mission statement is. It isn’t a documentary, but a portrait of a lost boy. The movie is mostly told from Malvo’s perspective and should have begun with his first shot on screen. The bookends of this movie are scenes of Malvo feeling rejected and rejecting the black women in his life. These women’s actions that they take on his behalf actually may have a harmful effect, but are not instantly obviously harmful. He is shown in a paradise setting, Antigua, until he is drawn to Muhammad, who is shown as a kind of Pied Piper to children, but it is later revealed in dialogue that he violated a court order, kidnapped his children and left the country. Many of these events don’t reflect real life, but Malvo is depicted as a young man in exile from any normal, adult human interaction thus vulnerable to Muhammad’s charms. Malvo becomes the children that Muhammad can’t have, and Muhammad becomes the adult and father who can give orders. It is a sick twisted codependent relationship, but not an equal one because Malvo is a child.
Blue Caprice shows rather than tells so it expects its viewers to pick up on the holes in Muhammad’s stories to others versus reality. My mom heard that the movie was based on a true story and agreed to watch the movie with me, but has no memory of the actual events to compare it to whereas I have the benefit of hindsight. I would not be surprised if a lot of viewers did not respond similarly to Muhammad’s increasingly obvious mental deterioration as the movie progressed. She kept saying, “He seemed like a nice father. When they took away his children, it seemed to make him crazy.” I responded, “They took away his children because he was dangerous. He was never nice. That was a kidnapping.” I’m surprised that more people don’t pick up on cues of mental instability that seem obvious to me, but because men have the privilege of acceptance of a wide range of negative behavior before it is considered worthy of action, it goes largely unnoticed: lying, not contributing to expenses that he incurs, taking children and removing them from their home country, stalking, violating restraining orders, gun use, calling psychological abuse instruction, frequent use of guns, expecting more from others than he gives, criticizing people for the way that people do things that he does not actually do. We have so normalized pathological behavior that it is a surprise to most when he starts killing people.
Blue Caprice nails the real tragedy of this story that Malvo mistakes attention and controlling to abusive behavior by an adult as love and normal. Kids don’t know what crazy is until, if they are lucky, they get older, are exposed to normal behavior and retroactively compare their experience with healthy ones and realize. The matter is further complicated by the idea of toxic masculinity and how a lack of a father should be less of a concern than the lack of quality fathering. Malvo and other bystanders are just happy that a man has taken an interest in Malvo that they don’t go a step further and question whether he is even his father or whether he is a good one. The most powerful scene is when Muhammad is abusing Malvo, and in contrast to his rejection of women’s actions, he is like a modern day Isaac, submissive and screaming Dad.
I have no idea if Blue Caprice reflects real life, but it depicts Malvo and Muhammad as mostly living in predominantly white communities and quickly having to leave black communities because black people are more likely to notice that something is wrong and begin to question their story or admonish them if they are seen doing something wrong. Because mass shooters are usually not spotted and predominantly white, it makes sense that their behavior would be more acceptable in a white community. I hope that it is true, but considering that in real life, Malvo’s mom may have trusted Muhammad with the care of her son when she got deported without him (what could go wrong if you separate children from their parents), I think that it may be fiction.
Mom thought that Blue Caprice was the scariest movie that she ever saw. She doesn’t watch enough scary movies because it really wasn’t. If I had come to the movie in the right frame of mind, I probably would not have been bored and would have enjoyed it more if I was prepared to see an independent, French film with American actors. Once the violence starts to occur, and we start to get to the more familiar part of the story, it is abbreviated and rushed through. The movie is an atmospheric, deliberate meditation on two people leaning on each other, but instead of as emerging stronger, it becomes a new cycle of abuse and the birth of another dangerous and violent man in training who hates women.