Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

I watched Ezra Edelman's O. J.: Made in America when ESPN first broadcast it in June 2016 and recently rewatched it on DVD. It is a remarkable documentary, one of the best I have seen in years on any subject. Made in America is ambitious, nuanced, and poignant. Visually and aurally, it is intelligent and evocative, sometimes graceful. Richly contextualized, Made in America is also long: eight hours spread over five episodes. I suppose that makes it an American epic. At the same time, the documentary represents an American tragedy: tragedies, actually. Obviously, the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were horrific. (The film's depiction of the crime scene is gruesome.) Yet to understand how we got to that grisly moment, make sense of the subsequent O. J. Simpson murder trial (which was bizarre, to say the least), and consider what it all meant and means, Edelman documents numerous other tragedies, racially charged brutalities and miscarriages of justice that plagued Los Angeles for generations. Then there is Simpson himself. He is no tragic hero, in the Aristotelian sense, despite his massive hubris. But Made in America also suggests that he was and is a complicated and multifaceted man, prone to narcissism and frightening violence, a depressing product of a country and culture that has failed to confront its racist past and present and that valorizes wealth and fame to such an extent that it blinds many people.

Formally, Made in America is masterful. Each of its five parts is composed of hundreds of well-chosen shots, which come in many varieties, expertly woven together, accompanied by a haunting score by Gary Lionelli. Like Ken Burns and his researchers, Edelman and his team did their homework. They found, and in some cases created, some extraordinary images. The film's aerial images of different Los Angeles neighborhoods are unusually elegant (perhaps because they are shot relatively low and slow) and other images are eerie, such as those of Nicole Brown Simpson's Bundy Drive condo in Brentwood at night, which are taken from the street outside her home and recreate the impression that she is being stalked.

Edelman's team also dug deeply into primary sources (newspaper stories, legal documents, home movies, Nicole Brown Simpson's diary entries and desperate 911 calls when she is being physically and verbally abused by Simpson, and Simpson's trial notes), archival film and television footage and photographs, and interviews with more than sixty people from Los Angeles. Some of these people are well known, and one would expect them to be in the film: for example, prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark, her boss District Attorney Gil Garcetti, criminal defense attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Barry Scheck, LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, Ron Goldman's father Fred Goldman, and journalist Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (1996). Their insights are invaluable, even when covering well-trodden territory. The film also includes testimony from lesser-known people who have equally valuable, trenchant things to share, such as Simpson's former agent Mike Gilbert, civil rights activist Danny Bakewell, former LAPD officer and Simpson friend Ron Shipp, Nicole Brown Simpson's friend Robin Greer, news helicopter pilot Zoey Tur, defense attorney Carl Douglas, criminal trial jurors Yolanda Crawford and Carrie Bess, among many others. Collectively, these people provide multiple perspectives on Simpson and the different contexts in which his life, athletic and acting careers, murder acquittal, and subsequent 2008 imprisonment for armed robbery and kidnapping need to be understood.

I am especially impressed by how Made in America represents the complex, troubling relationship among African-American citizens in Los Angeles, the LAPD, and the criminal justice system. Knowing this history is essential to understanding why Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and Goldman, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. With economy and skill, the film retells the story of the devastating Watts riots (1965), in which thirty-four people were killed and more than 3,400 people were arrested; the police shooting of Eulia Love...