Getting away with murder
Back around the turn of this century, The Post’s pages were full of stories about the bizarre saga of Robert Durst, the scion of a very prominent Manhattan real estate family charged with murder in Texas.
Durst, arrested while disposing of a neighbor’s dismembered body and dressed in drag, hadn’t been seen since 1981. That’s when authorities identified him as a suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Kathie, who was declared legally dead in 2001.
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The unmistakable protagonist of Andrew Jarecki’s compelling docudrama-à-clef “All Good Things,” Durst was acquitted in the Texas killing on grounds of self-defense. He has never been charged in his wife’s disappearance — or in the murder of his best friend, in California, at about the same time as his neighbor’s demise.
Though the movie doesn’t use real names and the press notes say it’s “inspired” by the Durst case, it seems to follow many of the facts rather closely — all the while mixing in not a little provocative speculation.
Called David Marks in this movie, the Durst character is played by the intense Ryan Gosling as an eccentric nut job. David chafes at his job as a rent collector for a bunch of sleazy Times Square properties owned by the family, which is betting the area’s long-hoped-for renaissance will materialize (it did).
David repeatedly clashes with his father, a stand-in for patriarch Seymour Durst portrayed with forbidding authority by Frank Langella. Dismayed by his drug habits and David’s choice of a down-market wife, the old man prepares to anoint David’s more reliable and complaisant younger brother as his successor.
The older son and his wife move to Vermont, where they live happily for a very brief time, running the health-food store of the title. Circumstances and David’s growing paranoia conspire to bring them back to the New York area, where David physically abuses his wife until she asks for a divorce.
Going well beyond the court transcripts they extensively quote, Jarecki and co-writer Marc Smerling strongly suggest that (1) Robert Durst killed his wife; (2) his father, now deceased, may have helped dispose of the body and bought off the Westchester district attorney (Diane Venora); and (3) Durst murdered the Texas neighbor (Philip Baker Hall), who killed the California friend (Lily Rabe) at his behest because of blackmail demands.
The Durst family has unsurprisingly threatened to sue over this movie, which was shot three years ago and sold back to Jarecki after the original distributor, the Weinstein Co., got cold feet.
As it happens, the Weinsteins are opening another film with Ryan Gosling later this month, the even grimmer “Blue Valentine.” Though it’s a far-from-perfect movie with some especially awkward transitions, I think “All Good Things” is the better of the two, with Kirsten Dunst’s best performance ever as the doomed wife.
Jarecki, the wealthy co-founder of Moviefone who directed the acclaimed documentary “Capturing the Friedmans,” here presents another memorable portrait of a dysfunctional family over three decades.
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