In Best Film – 243 points / 22 votes
In Best Documentary – 133 points / 30 votes
“First of all, let’s get that pesky film-versus-television debate out of the way. On an aesthetic level, I suppose I understand the gripes from the ‘O.J.: Made in America is TV, not film’ camp. Those fades to black are clearly meant to be commercial breaks, which may well throw some people off in a theater; and as far as the filmmaking goes, Ezra Edelman’s nonfiction epic hews pretty closely to a fairly conventional talking-heads style familiar to faithful ESPN 30 for 30 watchers, the nonfiction series in which the film debuted on television. And maybe the questions surrounding the fact that O.J.: Made in America qualified for year-end poll and awards-season consideration simply because it played for one week in one theater in New York City—which, in some people’s minds, adds up to little more than category fraud—are worth pondering, especially as plenty of other films—like Jonathan Demme’s Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids, which premiered on Netflix—were disqualified for not playing in any theaters for a week. Maybe we all need to rethink those qualifications in the first place, especially with more people seeing movies through streaming platforms instead of in theaters these days.
“In the end, though, O.J.: Made in America, as with any work of art, deserves to be considered as an experience unto itself, regardless of the medium in which it was consumed. And Edelman’s film (yes, you’ll see me refer to it as a ‘film’ from here on in; deal with it) is, by any measure, quite the experience. O.J.: Made in America is so consistently gripping throughout its almost-eight-hour length that it’s perhaps all too easy to be suspicious of how effortless Edelman makes it all seem. After all, the story of O.J. Simpson has just about all the tried-and-true elements of great drama: a rise-and-fall arc, a charismatic yet complex and possibly deeply disturbed protagonist, a courtroom drama in the middle of it all with a host of colorful supporting players and a whirlwind of interlocking and/or diverging motives, and so on. One might uncharitably argue that Edelman has hold of a great subject, and that O.J.: Made in America works simply because he doesn’t screw it up.
“But such faint praise would be doing a grave disservice to Edelman’s startling achievement here. Surely, it took a filmmaker of deep vision to not only see the broader implications of the ‘Trial of the Century,’ but to boldly give those implications their full exploratory due. Edelman isn’t afraid to spin off into lengthy tangents that dive into, among other subjects, the fraught history of American race relations, especially in Simpson’s own home city of Los Angeles, all of which would feed into the murder trial itself, turning it into even more a referendum on racial progress in this country than it was about discovering whether Simpson really murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In some ways, Edelman sees O.J. Simpson the way most of the U.S. did during that trial: as a symbol, though in Edelman’s case, it’s one with the full weight of not just American racism, but the American Dream itself and how it can curdle in an instant.
“Still, all told, this is the story about one particular individual and his own personal experience, and Edelman knows that to give us the full dawning visceral awareness of just how high he climbed and how steeply he fell, he has to give us his entire story, without any shortcuts: from celebrated athlete to plain celebrity, and from tabloid notoriety to eventual has-been scraping the bottom of the barrel for any remnants of his previous fame. At the very least, O.J.: Made in America offers a sterling example of the inadequacy of any two- or three-hour biopic to bottle up a person’s life into an easily digestible package, especially one as full of twists and turns as O.J. Simpson’s, and especially one as chock full of unsettling connotations for race and class in America.
“Ultimately, it’s Edelman’s thoroughness that mightily impresses. But let’s not give short shrift to O.J.: Made in America’s brilliance as filmmaking. In his Chicago Reader review of Reds, Dave Kehr talked about what he saw as Warren Beatty’s skillful evocation of the ‘novelistic effect’ in his film: ‘the network of delayed effects, sustained motifs, developing characters, and echoing ideas that gives a great novel its power.’ This is precisely the artistic arena Edelman is playing in with O.J.: Made in America, to equally powerful effect. Seeing, say, home-movie footage of O.J. Simpson with a protege re-appear on-screen about an hour later in a starkly different and more sobering context, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a sure-handed filmmaker who is shaping his material for maximum revelatory dramatic impact. O.J.: Made in America doesn’t need to reinvent any aesthetic wheels: It already has the richness of a great piece of long-form journalism, one that, considering our current political climate, will probably still resound for years, maybe even decades, to come.” ~ Kenji Fujishima
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