The film “Blue Caprice”, by Alexander Moors, is a dramatic
reenactment, although a but telescoped, of the lives of John Allen Muhammad
(original name Williams) and Lee Boyd Malvo, perpetrators of the Beltway Sniper
Attacks (Wikipedia link) in Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC in October 2002. The title of the film is based on the
automobile from which Malvo sniped while hiding in the trunk, as he was when
the pair was apprehended at a rest stop on I-70 on South Mountain near
Hagerstown, MD on Oct. 24, 2002. For a whole evening shortly before their capture, traffic was stopped on I-95 from Washington almost to Richmond, about 100 miles.
The film starts in the Caribbean, where the older man
(Isaiah Washington) meets Malvo (Tequan Richmond), and there is very early a
conversation that “life is not fair” and that “life s..”, and something must
make this right. Muhammad takes Malvo to
his original home around Tacoma, WA, where we learn that Muhammad had lost the
right to see his kids after a bitter divorce, which the film plays up as the
cause of his rage. Muhammad becomes “father” to the teen, in a relationship
that is depicted as exploitive and rather sickening, although not erotic. The pair goes to New Jersey, as they bounce
around with a couple of gun-totting sidekicks, before the spree starts.
The film is a bit of a warning in that Muhmmad explains his
plot as a kind of “helter skelter” (at least, that’s one way to say it). He thought that asymmetric random attacks
could bring the country to its knees, as if to cause martial law. Wikipedia articles talk about prosecutors’
charges of his intention to extort various state governments and other
authorities, but the film doesn’t mention these. The film does not try to give a chronology of
all of the attacks. But this episode is
likely to become the subject of a CNN “Crimes of the Century” documentary soon.
The film is shot in full “2.35:1” aspect, and I saw it at
the West End Cinema in Washington before a relatively small late Sunday
audience. The soundtrack, as presented,
sounded a bit muffled by modern standards.
The music background in includes an F#-Minor slow movement from the big
A Major Sonata by Franz Schubert.
The link for the film us here. Sundance is distributing this film directly.
The apparently random nature of the crimes at first made me
remember a few other bizarre unsolved crimes near Washington. These all need
some good investigatory journalism and perhaps attention in film. In August, 2008 a technician at JPL Kanika
Powell was mysteriously targeted at her apartment (story here ) In
November 2008, there was a mysterious shooting of security specialist Sean
Green (account ).
In Upper Marlboro MD, teen Amber Stanley
was shot at home in bed in an unsolved home invasion (story).
These have remained cold according to media reports, perhaps a good topic for
NBC Dateline, CNN, or ABC 20-20, or an adventurous documentary filmmaker. A few of the most troubling (from several
veiwpoints) cases in NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series deserve complete
followup in documentary film, such as that of Rabbi David Kaye (story).
Picture : I-95 construction in Virginia, July 2013.
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