Docs like 'Casting JonBenet' mix fact and fiction, which makes them more honest

As a tween in Melbourne, Kitty Green believed in the myth of the perfect American family. A steady diet of "The Brady Bunch" and "Full House" will do that.

But that was before the 6-year-old beauty pageant princess JonBenét Ramsey was found slain in 1996 in Boulder, Colorado.

Green, now a filmmaker, had mistaken fiction for reality. Decades later, she's examining that elusive line in the inventive documentary "Casting JonBenet."

The film doesn't reinvestigate the case. Instead, Green traveled to Ramsey's hometown to learn about the memories and conspiracy theories of the people who live there. She wasn't interested in the truth of the case so much as deeper truths about human nature - and she made her movie using elements from traditionally fictional films. She had actors in costumes re-enact unverifiable episodes on sets that looked like the Ramseys' house. The movie doesn't even contain archival footage.

Some moviegoers expect documentaries to deliver straight, unadulterated facts. But that's not what viewers get from acclaimed documentarians such as Green, Joshua Oppenheimer ("The Act of Killing"), Sarah Polley ("Stories We Tell") and Robert Greene ("Kate Plays Christine"), who add dashes of performance to their versions of reality. Does it make those movies more or less truthful than, say, "Making a Murderer," which had all the hallmarks of a traditional documentary, with talking heads and B-roll, but was refracted through the lens of directors with inherent biases?

"For me, the films that appear to be less fictional are just doing a better job of hiding their fictional aspects," Greene said during a recent conversation about "Kate Plays Christine."

Documentaries have always straddled the line between art and science, according to film scholar Judy Hoffman, who teaches at the University of Chicago.

Eadweard Muybridge's galloping horses gave the world irrefutable facts. His footage showed what was previously unproved: When horses run, all four hoofs come off the ground at once. But some of the earliest examples of documentary - before the word existed - were experimental and surreal. Hoffman points to the 1929 Russian film "Man With a Movie Camera," with its avant-garde cinematography and editing, and "The Song of Ceylon," from 1934, which added sound effects and montages to its chronicle of life in Sri Lanka.

"People have always had the idea that documentaries are independent and they have this morally superior purity to them, but that's never been the case," Hoffman said. "It's kind of like documentaries have this contract with the audience that other films don't that what you see is real. Every film is a construction."

"Casting JonBenet" just tends to show its construct more conspicuously than others. The movie is not easy to describe, but here goes: Green put out a casting call for local actors to play the parts of the people involved in the Ramsey case. Little girls with blond ringlets showed up to play JonBenet, and older residents portrayed the girl's parents, the police chief and a creepy ex-con who falsely confessed to the slaying.

Part of the movie consists of dramatizations of what might have happened that night, but most of it is interviews with the locals, who relay their memories of the case and their speculation about the unsolved crime. They reveal intimate anecdotes about themselves - their cancer diagnosis, their murdered family member, the abuse they suffered as children. The message is that each person's past informs their judgment.

"Immediately it became personal," Green remembers of the interviews she conducted with about 200 people. "'My mother has bipolar disorder, so I think it was the mother' or, 'My brother used to hit me as a kid, so I think it was the brother,' and then they would tell me their own stories for an hour and I'd be captivated."

It's a tricky time for a movie to delve into conspiracy theories. After "Pizzagate" rumors online inspired a gun-toting North Carolina man to drive to the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong to "self-investigate" a child sex ring that didn't exist, the dangers of false information have never been more apparent.

Even when our sources are unreliable, though, there's still something we can learn from the process of trying to synthesize the information we have.

In the 2012 movie "Stories We Tell," actress-filmmaker Polley interviewed her father, siblings and family friends, asking questions about her mother, who died of cancer years before. In the movie, what looks like retro home movie footage is actually a mixture of old films and re-enactments with actors. That might seems sneaky, but it gets to the heart of what Polley was trying to show.

"I read this thing a few years ago that said when you have a memory of something, you are actually having a memory of your last memory of it," Polley told The New York Times around the movie's release. "That's part of who we are as human beings. We tell stories as well as we can but generally kind of sloppily even when we're trying our hardest."

Storytelling about storytelling is a large part of "The Act of Killing" as well. Oppenheimer's Oscar-nominated documentary revisits the state-sanctioned mass murder that occurred in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. In the movie, the men responsible for the deaths, who are hailed as heroes, delight in recounting the methods they used to kill people and agree to act out the events, as if they're in gangster films or Westerns. Oppenheimer described the movie as "a documentary of the imagination," and it revealed not just what happened, but also how the perpetrators view themselves.

Then there's "Kate Plays Christine," in which Greene followed actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepared for the role of Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who shot herself on live television in 1974. The movie that Sheil was prepping for didn't really exist, but the documentary had clips of her in costume with makeup on, performing dramatizations. (Coincidentally, the film screened at Sundance the same year as "Christine," a fictionalized account of Chubbuck's story.)

Greene says that making a documentary about an actress naturally makes audiences question if what they're seeing is real. But he felt as if he was being more open with his viewers than a lot of filmmakers are. He was holding up his manipulations for the world to see.

"I think authenticity is a thing we're selling on the side of the road like a peddler with watches in his coat - that's something we sell to our audiences, and I believe that's a fallacy," he said. "But I still believe there's value in observing reality with a camera and there's value in creating something out of those observations."

There's something seductive about thinking that, when we watch a documentary, we're getting nothing but the truth. But any savvy consumer of journalism knows that objectivity is a myth. Storytellers are constantly weighing which anecdotes to include and what to leave out. These documentarians go a step further by inventing a performance that augments reality. And by doing so, they remind us how thin the line between fact and fiction can be. Suddenly, the Oscar-winning "O.J.: Made in America," a documentary that took a strong perspective on the case, and FX's "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story," a dramatization that used meticulous research, start to seem more similar than different.

Every story is going to be subjective based on who's doing the telling. In "Casting JonBenet," the actors might not have had their facts straight, but they still had stories to tell. Those tales are instructive for the audience, but sometimes the actors had realizations, too.

"I think it was cathartic for everyone in a way, and that's what we intended," Green said. "We kind of wanted to close the book on this and go, OK, that's enough now. Like, there's no point speculating anymore; let's find a way through this."