Blue Caprice: Trying to Understand Evil

In this day and age, of Syrias and Obamacares and DOMAs and stop-and-frisks, it's easy to forget that a surrogate father and son combination were murdering random citizens in the greater Washington D.C. area under the shadow of 9/11. Blue Caprice begins by reminding us of the senseless murders with newsreel footage of frantic police officers at suburban crime scenes and 911 calls from harrowed eyewitnesses, many of whom were unaware that what they've just seen was death. This recall serves not only to reorient viewers to the crimes and the context, but to also preemptively satisfy whatever morbid curiosity may exist in viewers who wish to see the horrific breedings and beatings that one would logically assume would lead to the infamous Beltway sniper attacks.

For you see, Blue Caprice is not a film about horrors but about how horror can be catalyzed and nursed, given the confluence of proper conditions. When Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond) and John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) first meet, the former is wandering aimlessly through the streets of Antigua, recently abandoned by his mother and only remaining parent, and the latter is frolicking with his three young kids while on a "special vacation" away from their mother. The implication is clear to us, but lost on Malvo, but it doesn't matter—he sees love and affection when he's been used to isolation.

Eventually, Muhammad, a U.S. citizen, returns to the States sans children, but with Malvo in tow, whom he introduces to new and old friends as his son. Malvo doesn't speak much, but he has plenty of time to listen and what he hears from his adoptive father is enough poisonous distortion to manipulate Malvo's blank slate mind into one that sees the world as a bully that needs to be bullied back. It's not through impassioned speeches, savage beatings or sexual abuse that Muhammad shapes his young apostle, but through paranoid rhetoric mixed with self-pity, illusions of victimization, and—most importantly and most effectively—genuine love and affection. "Do you love me?" Muhammad asks. A weak nod is his response. "Then I need you to do something for me." That something, the murder of an innocent young girl, comes not from the result of young clay being pounded into form, but from loving, deliberate shaping and craftsmanship.

The result of Muhammad's warped care and affection is the killing spree of which we are all familiar. Director Alexandre Moors shoots (pardon the verb) the spree sparsely, wisely sidestepping needless macabre and coldness for the sake of impressions. Snippets of the blue Caprice traveling down the highway are intercut with shots of the already fallen victims again narrated by the confused voices of 911 callers. "A man just fell down right in front of me" one of the callers declares. Entirely removed from context, we wouldn't be sure of why a landscaper was laying motionless in the grass either. By the time Malvo starts pulling the trigger from his jerry-rigged bunker in the trunk, the "what" has been overshadowed by the "how" and "why."

And yet, while it is truly terrifying to see Malvo devolve from a naive young man to a cold-hearted killer, Blue Caprice, despite being based on a true story, doesn't seem to earn that ultimate result. All the pieces are in place to theoretically explain how these atrocities could've ever occurred and on paper it makes sense that A would lead to B and then on to C, but there's still something lacking, some type of intangible darkness that would lead us to believe why Muhammad would see murder as a logical extension of his worldview. He's clearly a man that feels the world has done him wrong, but we must meet hundreds of those people every year and very few of them decide to pick up a rifle and purposely target pregnant women or the elderly at random.

The fault for this doesn't necessarily rest on screenwriter Ronnie Porto or director Moors, though, but perhaps on the fact that evil of this magnitude cannot be easily understood or conveyed. For the span of a few weeks in October 2002, 10 innocent people were killed and 3 more were critically wounded. It's very likely that for as long as we all live, no answer or explanation will ever be satisfying.