The most harrowing film I think I’ve yet seen.
Bad things happen in this world, and eventually they happen to us all. It’s an inescapable facet of life; there’s no getting around it. Sometimes really bad things happen - events so horrid and unspeakable they threaten to destroy us completely. We’re barraged with such stories on the evening news each week, and while the headlines may give us pause, we’re rarely engaged on a true emotional level. And that is precisely what the documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father achieves: making a headline real, allowing viewers to live through the tragic events chronicled and feel the anguish and heartbreak of all involved as it happened. Kurt Kuenne’s film is often not easy to watch, but through the story of his murdered best friend and the son he never knew he had, the director arrives at some rather profound conclusions. Namely, that our lives and our actions - whether for good or ill - have deep, far-reaching effects; oftentimes through connections that are only seen after it’s too late.
The main focus of the film is a young man named Andrew Bagby, Kuenne’s childhood friend who was found tragically murdered in a Pennsylvania state park. Wanting to make a lasting document of his friend, Kuenne decides to embark on an epic road trip, interviewing all of Bagby’s friends and relatives to find out everything he possibly can about his life. Then it comes out that Bagby’s murderer, a disturbed ex-girlfriend who fled to Newfoundland to escape prosecution, is four months pregnant with Bagby’s child. Kuenne switches gears, deciding instead to turn his movie into a letter explaining to Bagby’s son about the father he’ll never know. Meanwhile, Bagby’s parents quit their jobs and leave their lives in America behind and move to Newfoundland in an attempt to win custody of their grandson. What follows is both a nakedly emotional overview of Bagby’s life, a brutally honest true-crime documentary of a case as it unfolds, and an angry screed at the Canadian judicial system that ultimately destroyed the lives of everyone close to Andrew.
It’s hard to be critical of a film that’s clearly such a personal work for the filmmaker, and Kuenne holds nothing back in his portrayal (Kuenne’s own voice cracks and chokes up as he narrates certain segments). Also peppered throughout are several montages, where Kuenne takes old home movies and photographs and creatively edits them together to sometimes stunning effect. Wanting to be a filmmaker from a young age, Kuenne often cast his best friend in his childhood movies, and reassembles much of that old footage to tell the film's story. Not all of his choices work - there are a few questionable transitions, and a jarring segment where the film becomes almost like a horror movie, with violent edits and a harsh, mechanical soundtrack for one especially terrible turn in the story. But those choices are part of Kuenne’s vision, and designed to represent just what it was like to live through the occurrences as they happened. The freewheeling structure of the narrative also barely manages to hold together at times, as Kuenne hits us with a barrage of information at certain key points of the film, threatening to overwhelm the audience with details of Andrew’s family tree and the grueling legal battles staged for the custody of his son. But again, all of this serves to put us in the mindset of Bagby’s family and friends as they lived through this exhausting ordeal, and it’s hard to argue with the end result.
The real MVP’s of the movie are Bagby’s parents, David and Kathleen. Being that Andrew was their only child, the Bagby’s are understandably devastated to learn of his murder, and once they discover that his killer/ex-girlfriend Shirley Turner is pregnant with his child, devote their lives wholly to getting custody of the last, living remnant of their son. The things those two underwent while trying to achieve this… Words could never do it justice. At one point, the Canadian courts revert custody back to Turner (after she was released early from prison), and the only way the Bagby’s can see their grandson is by getting approval from Turner for shared visitations - which means these two have to spend time with their son’s killer. Through recorded phone conversations and home video footage, it’s astonishing the level of commitment David and Kathleen show as they deal with Turner politely and professionally. It’s also important to note that while Kuenne’s sympathies clearly lie with the Bagbys, he never once sanctifies or preaches - allowing his camera to capture some brutally emotional moments which may not necessarily paint David and Kathleen in the best light *. But they don’t need to be sanctified in order to earn audiences’ sympathies - they could have been utterly rotten people, but the sheer amount of terrible things that happen to them throughout the film would put anyone on their side. But the Bagby’s most remarkable attribute is their utter determination and refusal to quit. Time and again David and Kathleen try their best to do things the “right” way, and time and again they are punished for it - but they keep on going anyway, right up to the time the end-credits roll.
Being a creative person myself, I often get the question of why I don’t just write stories with happy endings all the time. Watching Dear Zachary, it’s admittedly hard to argue against forms of escapism that give us release from the types of horrors in the world depicted in the film - but the real answer lies within the film itself. Art is such a powerful thing; something we as a society have allowed to be marginalized and devolved into simple entertainment. But art can be so much more - Kurt Kuenne’s reasons for making his documentary changed repeatedly during its production, but it all started with grieving over the death of his close friend and attempting to craft a work to better understand this world we all share. As Joyce Caroll Oates once said, “The individual voice is the communal voice; that voice is yours and mine.” The story of Dear Zachary has the potential to be relentlessly depressing, but Kuenne manages to find the silver lining in the end. Through the tragic events of his film, Kuenne shows the ramifications of the death of just one person on a local, national and even global scale - helping us all to better understand just how precious a thing life is indeed.
To further underline the power of art, thanks in part to Kuenne’s film and the tireless activism of David and Kathleen Bagby, a bill was passed into law in the Canadian judicial system for courts to justify posting bail for parents accused of serious crimes, helping to prevent the type of tragic outcomes documented in Dear Zachary from ever happening again.
* SPOILERS (if you’re worried about spoiling a movie that’s now four years old and based on a true-crime story anyway): there’s one especially chilling scene where David says the only way he could have saved the life of his grandson is by killing Turner herself. He says he’s spent the last few years weighing all the possibilities in his head, and the only one that ends with his grandson still alive and living a relatively normal life is if he had snuck out and killed Shirley Turner without his wife’s knowledge.
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