by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All Rights Reserved
The latest “world premiere” movie on Lifetime last night was
Cleveland Abduction, based on the famous
case of three women who were kidnapped in Cleveland, Ohio and held in captivity
for over a decade by an astonishingly ordinary person, Ariel Castro (Raymond
Cruz), who worked weekdays as a school bus driver and occasionally played gigs
in a salsa band which rehearsed in his living room, having no idea that three
women were in the same house being held against their will. The story broke
when the women were rescued in May 2013 after Castro made a slip and,
amazingly, left his front door unlocked, thus allowing one of the women to get
the attention of the neighbors, who ultimately called the police, who rescued
the women and staked out the house (an unprepossessing Cleveland row house
whose very ugliness and lack of charm make it virtually its own character in
the film). The film was at least nominally based on the memoir Finding
Myself by Michelle Knight (played in the
film by Taryn Manning), the first of Castro’s victims and the one who probably
suffered the most — for some reason, every time he got her pregnant he would
beat her up and kick her in the abdomen until she aborted, whereas he let one
of the other woman bear his child, and he also taunted Michelle because she
didn’t have a functioning family that was looking for her, putting up
missing-person posters for her, lobbying the media to keep covering her story
and the like the way the other two women he’d kidnapped, Amanda Berry (Samantha
Droke) and Nancy DeJesus (Jean Zarzour), did. What makes the story so
compelling is not only how horrifying Ariel Castro’s crimes were but how ordinary he seemed — this is the sort of tale that invites
invocation of Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Adolf Eichmann, “the
banality of evil” — he wasn’t an especially interesting person and he wasn’t
particularly well-to-do, either.
One expects the people engaged in this sort of
nasty sexual enslavement to be part of the 1 percent, like the originator and
the man after whom this conduct is named, the Marquis de Sade, or the legendary Bluebeard, or the
fictional Alexander Grey (the male protagonist in the insanely successful Fifty
Shades books) — yet here is an ordinary
proletarian, who drove a school bus (until he was laid off, whereupon his
treatment of his captives got even rougher, partly because he couldn’t afford
to feed them even what little he had before that and partly because he all too
predictably used them as an outlet on whom to take out his frustrations at being
unemployed) and led a small-time salsa band which played a few gigs at night.
The movie is unusually good by Lifetime standards, though I suspect that’s more
due to the inherently compelling nature of the story than any particular talent
of the filmmakers, including director Alex Kalymnios (who seems to have
instructed cinematographer Richard Wong not to hold the camera steady, but to allow it to move
in short, jerky ways that add to the nervousness of the situations being
depicted) and screenwriter Stephen Tolkin, who (inevitably) left out a lot of
Michelle Knight’s memoir but actually did a pretty good job of boiling it down.
The story of Ariel Castro remains enigmatic, partly because one month after he
pled guilty to over 900 criminal counts against him (inexplicably, he had
allowed his victims to keep journals and from those records the police and
prosecutors were able to piece together an indictment with a staggering 979
counts against him, from which he pled guilty to all but 40 and got the rather
preposterous sentence of life plus 1,000 years) he hanged himself in his cell,
thereby taking all the secrets of What
Made Ariel Run with him. From the few bits of Ariel Castro’s account of
his actions that are preserved —
in videotapes of police interrogations and courtroom proceedings — it seemed he
wanted to present what he did as no big deal, saying that the women were free
to leave and all the sex between him and them was consensual (yeah, right), and his overall affect, shown in the film in some
pretty smarmy dialogue that shows the level of doublethink Castro engaged in,
on one level needing to buy chains (presumably at the local Home Depot or Ace
Hardware), locks, handcuffs and other paraphernalia to keep his victims
chained, bound and captive, and also to make sure no relatives or friends or
neighbors learned his secrets; while he also simultaneously thought of them as
a “family” and had a twisted sort of love and affection towards them that comes
through in one pathetic (in both senses) scene in which he confesses some of
his failings to Michelle not long before she was rescued.
We know a good deal
more about Michelle Knight than we do about Ariel Castro, since she published a
book about her experiences (and apparently the other two women have clubbed together
to write their book, and a
British author interviewed on the Behind the Headlines show about the case after the movie has written a
third one from a more objective perspective) and showed herself to be
predisposed to be a victim of a sexual enslaver even before she and Castro met.
She was a “bad girl” who was molested by her mom’s boyfriend, ended up
partnered (professionally and personally) with a drug dealer until she was
busted, had a son somewhere along the way and ended up with him being a victim of physical abuse from one of the men
in her life, which got the kid taken away from her. Indeed, she was on her way
to a meeting at the Cleveland Department of Social Services to talk to them
about getting her boy, Joey (Kyle McCann), out of the clutches of the social
workers and the welfare department when on foot to the appointment in an
unfamiliar part of town, she was accosted by Ariel Castro and offered a ride.
The level of her naïveté is shown not only by the fact that the lure he used to
get her into his car was the promise of a puppy — one expects to see cute young
dogs more as the lure used by a pedophile to gain access to a pre-pubescent
child rather than a kidnapper and sexual enslaver to entrap an adult woman.
Later he gives her a puppy, only to kill it brutally in front of her face when
she’s disobeyed him in what’s probably the most chilling scene in the film
(though one that gives it a run for the money is one early on in her captivity,
when he’s strung her up and is hanging her from the ceiling like a piñata, and
she loses control of her bladder and starts involuntarily peeing through her
pants onto the floor below). Cleveland Abduction is a chilling tale, made all the more frightening (I
keep coming back to this, but it’s true) by Ariel Castro’s ordinariness — instead of the kind of eye-rolling villain one wants a character like this to be (mainly because at then
we could at least tell ourselves we’d know enough to avoid him, and at best be
able to figure out what he was doing and turn him in) he’s just a normal guy
who just happens to have a really twisted and disgusting hobby he managed to
keep secret from his family, friends neighbors and everybody else for over a
decade.
The best thing I can say for Raymond Cruz’s performance as Castro is he
projects the ordinariness by which he was able to stay under the radar of the
authorities for so long. He’s also got the knack of making us understand that
Castro saw nothing wrong with what he was doing — at least according to his own
statements (based on Michelle’s recollections of them during her long period as
his captive) he had conceived the idea of holding women captive after his wife
(the father of his daughter Emily, who was about the same age as Amanda and
Nancy and who unwittingly helped his dad entrap them — “But I’m not a stranger offering you a ride! I’m the father of a
friend of yours!”) left him, though he says little about her except to call her
a “bitch.” He’s blatantly foul-mouthed but in a way that’s pretty typical of a
working-class male — at one point he gives his captives a TV set but threatens
to take it away if they ever watch any programs featuring African-Americans,
whom he hates — and as the years go by (they don’t seem to go by as slowly as
they no doubt did in real life or they seemed to in Michelle Knight’s book,
mainly because Kalymnios and Tolkin had only a two-hour running time, less
commercials, to tell the tale) his actions and the responses of his captives
fall into a dull routine, so much so that when they finally do get the chance
to get out we’re as surprised as
they are. While I still think Emma Donoghue’s Room is the best story ever written about this type of
abduction (it opens six years after the woman has been taken captive and been
held in a shed, separate from her abductor’s house and built by him especially
for this purpose, and it’s told from the point of view of the woman’s
five-year-old son, who has literally
been born inside the room and known no other life) and I wish someone with the
right sort of demented imagination would film it, Cleveland Abduction is quite moving in a desperate sort of way, and
Kalymnios and Tolkin deserve a lot of credit (especially given the network they
were working for) for not milking
the tear-jerking aspects of the story, not turning it into a massive soap
opera, and trusting the horror of what Ariel Castro did to those women to come
through without a lot of manipulative direction and writing to guy the
audiences’ emotions.
