Do you really want to go back and relive the whole O.J. Simpson mess?
That's the question you should ask yourself before sitting down tomorrow night for the start of the four-hour CBS miniseries, "American Tragedy," starring Ron Silver, Ving Rhames, Christopher Plummer and Bruno Kirby.
Despite the pretentious title and taint of sleaze associated with treating such material in an entertainment format, "American Tragedy" is not without merit. It's just that once you dip your toe back in these waters and let yourself flow with the narrative tide, you end the viewing experience feeling like you really, really need a long, hot shower with lots of soap.
That narrative is credited to Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Norman Mailer, who is listed as the screenwriter. Normally, that would be a big deal. But very little of Mailer's greatness is in this script, which purports to tell the backstage story of the "Dream Team" of defense lawyers that won an acquittal for Simpson in the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman.
I level that charge against Mailer's script having just finished a 1,300-page collection of Mailer's work titled, "Time of Our Time," which is filled with some of his finest writing.
The real author of this work is Lawrence Schiller. The miniseries is based on his best-selling non-fiction book of the same title, and he is one of three executive producers. Baltimore readers will be especially interested to know the other two are Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, of "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz."
The film opens with Silver as defense attorney Robert Shapiro taking on Simpson's case after the discovery of the bodies of Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson outside her Brentwood condominium. The blood and the bodies are shown; Schiller, who also produced a miniseries with Mailer on Gary Gilmore, likes blood.
If there's one compelling reason to watch the miniseries, it's Silver's performance. Building on a makeup job that includes ridiculously poofed-up, thinned-out hair and eyebrows so thick and dark they would do a vaudevillian proud, Silver creates a brilliant portrait of middle-aged, male vanity given an extra oily edge of Beverly Hills glitz.
Second best performance goes to Plummer as an over-the-hill F. Lee Bailey, desperately clinging to an inflated sense of importance as he suffers one indignity after another at the hands of Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran (Rhames).
Cochran should be the guy you can't take your eyes from in the film. He is, after all, the one who emerged as the courtroom star, becoming in the process a lightning rod for many of the powerful and complicated emotions about race that the Simpson case triggered. But you never feel inside Cochran's head in this telling, and I don't think it has anything to do with Rhames' performance, which is just fine, but with the script.
The problem with Cochran's depiction is a result of a larger problem with the entire production: An all-white group of producers and writers is telling a story that's mainly about race.
I'm not saying white writers can't tell such stories, but they can only tell them from within the box of their own cultural history. It is monumental ignorance or arrogance on the part of Schiller, Levinson, Fontana and Mailer to have produced a miniseries on a topic as racially-charged as this without including African-Americans in the collaborative process.
The producers made some smart choices. While there is an actor playing Simpson (Raymond Forchion), mostly we either see Simpson from behind or hear him on a speaker-phone talking to his defense team. Simpson is a constant presence, but primarily through his voice. (The voice is done by Rodney Saulsbury.) When we see him from the front, footage from the trial of the real Simpson is used. The end result: Credibility is never strained by asking us to believe in anything but the real visual image of Simpson that has been burned into our collective memory by TV, magazines and newspapers.
But that's mainly a matter of appearances. In the end, it's no match for the damage done by the choice made in the far more substantive matter of not including African-American voices in the telling of this story. It makes you wonder whether Schiller missed one of the largest lessons that the saga of O.J. Simpson offers.
`American Tragedy'
When: Tomorrow night and Wednesday at 9 p.m.
Where: WJZ (Channel 13)
In brief: A white version of life backstage at the O.J. Simpson trial.
