We have closure. I’ll give it that much. Not every investigative documentary gives closure. But this one does. There’s possibly a little too much closure here, for the big mystery gets solved in roughly the first thirty seconds of film. Girl left for dead on the side of the road taken to hospital where she dies. Creepy older man comes in to check on her. Two witnesses immediately sense something “wrong” with the man. OK, we have our murderer. Wow, that was fast.
When she died, the girl was known as Tonya, a twenty year-old stripper from Oklahoma. Then her photograph made the public spotlight and somebody recognized that her real name wasn’t Tonya, and, in fact, like most strippers, Tonya was actually Sharon, a talented student with a full ride to Georgia Tech to be an aerospace engineer. Isn’t that always the case? But even that description won’t identify Frank, Sharon/Tonya’s husband/dad, the father of at least one her children, and among the most vile humans ever to walk the Earth.
Perhaps unsatisfied that it spoiled the mystery of Tonya’s death before the credits came up, Girl in the Picture gave us two more mysteries to chew on: who was Tonya/Sharon in reality? And what was the fate of Tonya’s son Michael who was kidnapped after several months in a foster home.
This is a picture that makes you loathe humanity. Every new fact you learn in the first hour makes you a little queasy … or queasier. The film is, essentially, a memorial/tribute to the memory of Sharon/Tonya, but, of course,
the Girl in the Picture has no lines in the picture. Everything about this investigation revolves around Frank, a villain, a goblin, an architect of misery.
It should be lost on no one how much Frank resembles Donald Trump: a narcissistic, a-moral, truth-challenged troll, gleefully creating havoc and ruining lives yet completely unwilling to take even the slightest amount of responsibility for his actions. Oh yeah, I know exactly who Frank is; I’ve seen this act almost daily since 2016.
Girl in the Picture is a decent documentary. I see it getting a lot of praise for its ability to follow a mystery to a conclusion and shock a few people along the way. I say it’s better than average, but I found the film for the most part to be a synopsis of sad people and painfully mediocre detective work. This is a good instructional tool for “how to make a documentary,” but let’s not get silly; there are many better documentaries out there. Some might not even spoil the big mystery in the first minute.
♪I’ve never seen you looking so breathless as you did tonight
I’ve never seen a shade so white
I’ve never seen so many men ask me where I was in the past
The questions they all asked to make a conviction last
And I’ve never seen that bruise you’re wearing
Or the matching set of welts that lined your eyes
He made you blind
The lady is dead
And glancing at me
For, like, a week
There’s nobody home, it’s kinda creepy
Not where I wanna be
But I hardly know this tragic homicide
I’ll never forget how stiff you were tonight♫
I’d apologize for being so tasteless here, but, if you’ve read t this point, there’s a near 100% chance you’ve dealt with my tastelessness before, so, *shrug* whatchagonnado?
Rated TV-MA, 101 Minutes
Director: Skye Borgman
Writer: Satan
Genre: The pain of reality
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who need closure
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Frank D. Floyd … or whatever his real name is
♪ Parody Inspired by “The Lady in Red”
