After two decades of media speculation and public fascination, filmmakers explore the macabre legacy of the unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, the world's most famous child-murder case.
Casting JonBenet's subject of a girl's murder is bound to leave people feeling shaken; it's a tribute to Green's talents that the film is so enjoyable.
Casting JonBenet is a dozen films in one. At only 80 minutes, that's a lot; and yet it never feels over-stuffed, overwrought, or like it is collecting and abandoning subplots (a frustrating trend of some recent documentaries).
It uses the Ramsey story as a prism for documenting our rabid rumor-mongering and far-away judgments of personalities hoisted onto a media stage. It is, oddly enough, about acting.
Whereas crime docs typically seek to offer everything that is known about a crime, Casting JonBenet proves how little we will ever understand about that night.
Casting JonBenet feels like someone gathered all their true crime friends in one room to discuss theories and then do a mock trial/live-action role-play. It's fun on the page...but it's not something everyone needs to see.
An amazing insight into this tale that forms both an affirmation for the public's enduring fascination but organically mutates into an examination of the way that people surrounding this tale project themselves into this scenario...