Hot Docs 2010: LIFE WITH MURDER Review

Anyone who is a parent will walk a fine line between empathy and judgment for the Jenkins family of Chatham, Ontario (Canada) while watching this documentary whodunit. When their 18-year-old Jennifer is brutally murdered in 1998 and their 20 year old son is the prime suspect, well, there are certainly some difficult loyalties to be sorted out. Especially when she was shot multiple times and dragged around the house a bit before passing on. Despite the lurid nature of the crime, the fact that it appears to be done within a family, and in a small town that probably has only a few murders a decade, director John Kastner (Rage Against the Darkness) manages to lay out the facts of the narrative with a look a the small details, and generate quite a bit of empathy for the parents, Brian and Leslie, although there is not much left in the tank for their incarcerated son, Mason, who is clearly an idiot.

You see, while the police have a very strong Mason, and we see this because the filmmakers have access to the police interrogation videos, he maintains his innocence and mom and dad do the tricky balancing act of mourning their daughter and supporting their son. This gets them ostracized from the community, and places a lot of stress on them, the kind of stress that results in medical problems and other physical ailments. And therein lies the interesting thesis of the film, how much will people go through to hold the family unit, no matter how dysfunctional and tarnished, together? Life With Murder would make a great part of a triple bill with Dear Zachary and The Staircase, two other top-shelf documentaries dealing with crimes within the family. It would be the middle balance between the angry passion and outrage of Dear Zachary and the cool detachment of The Staircase. Achieving empathy and understanding is a great accomplishment of Life With Murder. You certainly would not want to be in the Jenkin's shoes, but you do walk more than a mile with them on their difficult journey into the not-so-sweet hereafter, the rest of their lives.