The Matthew Shepard Story Review!!!
SYNOPSIS: In the weekend before their son's murderer is sentenced for his brutal slaying, Judy and Dennis Shepard grapple with a great many issues: personal guilt for not being there when Matthew needed them, the need to do right by him and the choice to ask for mercy in the attacker's trial.
ANALYSIS: The hardest thing to do, critically speaking, is to pick apart a movie based on true events, especially a film in which a person or people die. This is one of those films. Told mainly in flashbacks, The Matthew Shepard Story is a TV movie that debuted on NBC in 2002. It was accompanied, on HBO, with the film version of the play "The Laramie Project". Both tell basically the same story, but from different viewpoints: in this production, we follow Judy and Dennis as they try to figure out how to both honor Matthew while simultaneously asking for the death penalty for one of his attackers.
There are two major problems with this film, as I see it. The first is the simple fact it is a made-for-broadcast television movie. Because of censors, certain things had to be massaged. Look no further than two different censoring's of the word "faggot". Peculiar as it is, with a movie that uses fag and bastard freely, that faggot isn't acceptable is a bit mind boggling. To be completely fair, this review is based on the recent Lifetime airing of the movie and not the original version as seen on NBC. But this problem is a microcosm of the TV movie curse: what should be seen and said can't be. This boy was brutally murdered and left to die, bleeding, freezing and tortured. All we really see is a few quick scenes of the attack and the aftermath before the focus shifts to Judy and Dennis. It's far too little and sanitized for the audience to get a true idea of what happened. Granted, we will never know exactly what happened when the attackers left Matthew on the fence, so maybe it is better the movie doesn't try to fill in the holes.
The other problem, as much as I hate to say it, is Channing and Waterston. It seems as though they were cast in these roles because of a hiatus from their NBC shows at the time and not for any chemistry they may have on screen. Their acting is just fine; Channing is the better of the two, though. It's just that we never get the chance to buy them as Matthew's parents or as husband and wife. Their personae's get in the way of that, which leads me to believe casting no-names would have been better for the production, creatively. From a star power standpoint, Channing and Waterston are as big as NBC stars got earlier in this decade.
I do hate to say anything disparaging about a subject which hits close to my heart. But this is a generic, run of the mill TV movie. The characters, especially Matthew, are thinly drawn and the editing is spotty. We will be in mid conversation or mid action...and then fade to black. Again, it could be the stripped version for cable...or it could be a problem with the original production. Ultimately, The Matthew Shepard Story will work for some audiences and not for others. It is a glimpse of an event which rocked a great many people in the country and in the world. Is it the best TV movie ever made? Hardly. But it is an important piece of work.