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Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer: Review

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English documentarian Nick Broomfield's first film about prostitute-turned-multiple-murderer Aileen Wuornos, subtitled THE SELLING OF A SERIAL KILLER (1994), posed a series of questions — some glib, some discomforting — about the transformation of sensational criminal cases into infotainment. His second, which chronicles the months leading up to Wuornos' 2002 execution, asks what kind of criminal justice system executes the mentally incompetent. Broomfield was subpoenaed to testify in the last stage of Wuornos' 10-year-journey through Florida's legal system because his first documentary suggested that her inexperienced lawyer, an ambulance chaser who smoked dope before dispensing legal advice and tried to wring money from Wuornos' sad and sordid story, botched her defense. Wuornos' new lawyer also gathered character witnesses who'd known her as a child in Troy, Mich., hoping to put a gentler face on his foul-mouthed, hot-tempered client. Wuornos sabotaged all attempts to ameliorate her situation, but the witnesses' testimony gave Broomfield a first-hand glimpse of her brutal and degrading past. Abandoned by her mother as an infant and her maternal grandparents after she became pregnant at age 13, Wuornos spent a frigid winter living in the woods at the end of her family's street, prostituting herself, abusing drugs and alcohol, and eventually fleeing to the warmth of Florida. She killed a john named Richard Mallory in 1989 and went to trial in 1992, swearing she killed all her victims because they tried to rape and brutalize her. But with death by lethal injection looming, Wuornos — whose frankness and bleak sense of humor in the face of adversity Broomfield grew to admire while making his first film — changed her story: She killed in cold blood, she said, and would kill again unless executed. Broomfield's doubts about Wuornos' new confession are compounded by her talk of aliens, sinister radio waves, poisoned food, the coming apocalypse and the corruption of Florida police, whom she claims knew her identity after Mallory's murder but let her keep killing so they could profit from the tabloid-friendly spectacle of a female fiend. Released shortly after Patty Jenkins' MONSTER (2003), a fictional treatment of Wuronos' story, Broomfield's film is typically self-aggrandizing but filled with unsettling moments. The two unambiguous facts that emerge from Broomfield's trademark conspiracy theorizing and faux-naive bluster are that truth is a slippery thing and that presented with two choices, Wuornos always opted for the destructive one. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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