Imposter: Adding Truth to Truth with Fiction

 Frederic Bourdin makes no attempts to deflect or downplay that he is a liar. "I've always wanted to be someone else," he claims at the outset of the The Imposter—a sentiment I'm sure most of us have felt at one time or another in our lives. But while many of us may have wished for otherhood because of a bad day, week or even month, Frederic has always wanted to escape his life. Born into bigotry having been conceived of a French woman and an Algerian man, it was once suggested that Frederic's life should have been aborted before it began and he thusly lived the majority of his life not knowing love. A yearning for acceptance eventually led the 23-year old Frenchman to impersonate the 16-year old Nicholas Barclay, who had disappeared from his San Antonio home 3 years earlier.

But what's stranger than this is that the Barclays—mother Beverly Dollarhide, sister Cary Gibson and brother-in-law Bryan Gibson—all fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. There was no push back, no skepticism, no doubt. There were no dramatic moments àla Angelina Jolie in Changeling where Beverly Dollarhide looked upon the stranger pretending to be her lost young boy and screamed: "I want my son back!" It didn't matter that his eyes were a different color, that he had no memory of previous events or people, or that he spoke with a thick, French accent. Instead, the family who had gone through an emotional wringer for the previous 3 years attributed his strange behavior and physical change to the barbarous practices of a nebulous child sex ring by whom he claimed to have been captured, which included weekly rapes, daily beatings, and ocular pigment injections.

But how could a man perpetrate such a bold and ambitious lie? And how could the family be so blind as to not realize they were being deceived? How could this lie have been fact checked and approved by government officials, including an FBI agent and an American consul stationed in France? With the arrival of "Nicholas" in 1997, both Frederic and the Barclays in one form or another were able to find what they had for so long been looking and it's perhaps because of this that so many people were able, and perhaps willing, to perpetuate what would otherwise be the most unbelievable of deceptions.

Were The Imposter a feature length fiction film, the plot holes of the script would be apparent and frequent. "Completely unbelievable," critics would say. "Lacking any brains or comprehension of human logic or reason." And yet in this documentary, Frederic successfully carried on a false identity despite the odds being exponentially stacked against him.

The care and craft by which director Bart Layton maps out the story is efficient, logical and full of beauty. With the standard documentary talking heads, Layton makes clear the underlying turmoil amongst the Barclay family members that believably lead to a longing and desperation that emerged once Nicholas disappeared. Combine that with the inherently charismatic and love-starved Frederic, and we understand how the puzzle pieces could fit completely if not neatly. Thread by thread the wool is woven over the victims’ eyes—passively, gently, almost self-imposed.

Yet halfway through this tale of loss and (seeming) redemption, things change gears. Real life Private Investigator Charlie Parker begins unraveling the quilt of complacency. It's here that The Imposter goes from build up to breakdown. The collapse of the deception unearths even more mysteries. Frederic proposes his own hypothesis of why the ground was so fertile for his deception to take root. While it's a sound theory, one must also consider its source. It's clear that Frederic is sociopathic, but his tale is one of such lucidity and earnestness, we want to believe him.

Interspersed with the talking heads are re-dramatizations of the events that occurred, a device by no means new to documentaries—Errol Morris has been doing this since The Thin Blue Line—but the re-dramatizations are always only told from Frederic's perspective, painting a fictionalized portrayal of events for a man who has made a life out of fiction, and that makes them unique.

These vignettes become more than just gimmicks, they contribute a sense of escalation in the way that only fiction can. Man on Wire was able to accomplish a similar goal by identifying itself as part heist film; it should thus surprise no one to see the same producer, Simon Chinn, attached to both projects. This extra element is a true example of story dictating content rather than vice-versa and helps elevate what is already an engrossing and tightly-constructed documentary to one of the best films of the year.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, but through the use of fiction, this truth becomes something truer to its audience.