Chicago Tribune - March 8, 2002
Sid Smith, Tribune arts critic

Or, at the very least, he haunts our culture like a ghost. Even after all the intervening tragedy since his 1998 murder in Laramie, Wyo., Shepard is still with us, the subject of not one, but two television bio-pics this month, following the first on MTV in 2000. Clearly, his homicide endures as an emblem of the horrors of homophobia, just as lynching embodied similar hatred in another era.

He is thus martyr as well as victim, a conduit for healing, hope and finger-pointing. Both of these movies, "The Laramie Project" (which debuts at 7 p.m. Saturday on HBO) and "The Matthew Shepard Story" (8 p.m. March 16 on NBC), raise provocative questions as they tell their tales, questions that implicate a lot more of us than Shepard's murderers. The targets may shift and change, they suggest, but the hate-crime debate (no major legislation has yet been passed in the tragedy's aftermath) rages on.

Shepard, of course, is the 21-year-old gay man lured from a Laramie bar in 2000 to several miles outside of town, where he was beaten and robbed. He died several days later; his two attackers were tried, convicted and are now serving life sentences.

'The Laramie Project'

Though "The Matthew Shepard Story" is far from negligible, "The Laramie Project," adapted from the theatrical docudrama, is infinitely more compelling. Perhaps its vetting through the tricky thickets of theatrical production gives it a leg up. Moises Kaufman, who gave us the earlier theatrical tour de force, "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde," took members of his Tectonic Theater Project to Laramie in the days right after the slaying. They interviewed townspeople, Shepard's friends, family members and enemies, and the result is both a documentary and an eyewitness essay on Shepard and his death.

Though we learn, bit by bit, the details of the murder, arrests and subsequent trial, we also learn about incidental figures innocently entrapped by events. For instance, there's the well-meaning woman sheriff (Amy Madigan) early on the scene at the remote wooden fence where Shepard lay beaten, tied up and in a coma, barely alive. She rushed to do all she could to rescue him and get him to the hospital, drenching her own hands with his blood. Later, she learns he was HIV-positive, and her sympathy and that of her mother (Frances Sternhagen) turn to angry anguish. She suffers for months waiting to learn if her heroism will leave her a victim of the disease. (She turns out to be HIV-negative.)

There's the barely verbal bartender (Joshua Jackson) who waited on Shepard and his killers, church ministers who come down on opposite sides in the town's social debate, a car mechanic (Steve Buscemi) who used to drive Shepard to gay bars in other states, and sympathetic friends, including an openly lesbian professor (Janeane Garofalo).

The film weaves their commentary in and around a straightforward narrative, flashing back to the murder and confessions and moving on to the townspeople's travail as they adjust, first to a shocking crime and then to the media circus that descended on this tiny hamlet overnight.

There's a certain cat-and-mouse silliness in waiting to see what star will show up next, though the movie includes not only film celebrities such as Buscemi and (a not very good) Peter Fonda, but such stage regulars as Sternhagen, Terry Kinney (as Shepard's dad), Lois Smith, Kathleen Chalfant and the great post-modern mime, Bill Irwin.

Irwin delivers the most memorable moment in the movie. Playing a middle-aged gay man who lives in downtown Laramie, suffering from a broken limb, he watches from one window as a small procession ofdemonstrators march in honor of Shepard's memory. They turn the corner out of his view, but as he hobbles to an opposite window to catch them again, they've grown to a huge mob, and Irwin rhapsodizes on the bittersweet miracle sadly transforming this provincial, isolated community.

There's damnation of Laramie's surviving small-mindedness, but, then, the approach lets the townspeople condemn themselves.

'The Matthew Shepard Story'

"The Matthew Shepard Story" is more conventional, movie-of-the-week material, combining a sensation-tinged review of the murder with weepy, sudsy interludes. Still, director Roger Spottiswoode (whose film and TV credits include the recent "The Sixth Day") provides a moody, offbeat look at these events, a movie that's atmospherically a cut above the TV average.

He also focuses on a kind of thematic byproduct. Shepard's parents, played by Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing, agonize on whether to help one of the killers and plead for mercy at his trial. The story, though fraught with biographical details in flashback, is also thus one of warring liberal sensibilities.

Shepard himself is a bit sanctified in this version. There's no mention of his HIV status, for instance. But Waterston and Channing are such intelligent performers that they evoke the sympathy the story intends: If you can't identify with the gay son, at least you'll be heartbroken by the plight of his parents.

Not surprisingly, events overlap between the two films. Both feature versions of the elder Shepard reluctantly urging mercy for his son's killer, and both enact the scene in which friends dress up as angels to bar right-wing protesters from the courthouse steps.

Strangely, the accounts differ: The texts of the two speeches are different, and in "Matthew Shepard" the accused is depicted as weeping throughout Waterston's plea. He's dry-eyed in "Laramie."

"Matthew Shepard" offers the duller, more predictable treatment of these two events. Ultimately, both films tug at the heart, but "Laramie Project" is miles ahead in its penetrating, layered analysis.
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