• Swoon

8/23/20 (Sun)

Tom Kalin’s artsy 1992 film based directly on the Leopold and Loeb case, a contrast with the fictionalized Rope. Leopold and Loeb are presented outright as sexually involved, though the former appears more serious in the relationship than the latter. The boys, rich and extremely bright, would seem to have everything to live for. But through boredom or cynicism or apathy, they have turned to livening up their existence by pursuing various crimes such as fires and larceny to see what they can get away with. Loeb now ups the ante, setting his sights on murder, specifically the murder of a child. The movie basically follows the case after that, including the murder, their capture, their reaction (each trying to blame the other) and ultimate fate.

Whereas Rope was more interested in the motives and intellectual back-and-forth of the murderers, tying this to Nazi ideology, Swoon is a more personal look at Loeb’s controlling nature and Leopold’s obsessive desire to please him. The sense was that Loeb continued to push the boundaries to see how far he could make his friend – lover, in fact – stoop. The reward to Leopold was sex and seeing his friend happy, the thing that gives his own life meaning. Unlike its main predecessors (Rope and a film directly about the case called Compulsion), the film made the gay relationship between the protagonists overt, including bringing it up in the trial, which appears to be true in some form. (One argument that saved them from the gallows in real life was that their homosexuality twisted their thinking.) But the point here wasn’t so much about their gayness as about the deep desire of Loeb to latch on to something to justify his own self-worth.

The film borders on the pretentious much of the time and crosses it frequently. The various anachronisms, affected dialogue, unrelated characters (e.g. drag queens), strange camera angles (e.g. court scene) and such undermine the interesting perspective that the film takes on the lovers. It was visually stylish, with the recreated 1920s even more convincing than the documentary footage woven in throughout. I see that the one award it won at Sundance was for cinematography, which sounds right.

Content-wise, the film took a rather detached approach that observed without taking sides. The murder scene in particular held nothing back, showing the shocking slaying of the child in an almost clinical manner. If it had just told the story without the Citizen Kane aspirations, it would have been more effective; as it is, the wanna-be artistic touches only call attention to themselves, a common enough problem with first-time directors.

The performances of the two leads were very fine. Daniel Schlachet as Loeb had the ennui and casual cruelty down pat, while Craig Chester as Leopold suggested that there was a conscience down there if the character had the strength of mind or self-respect to follow it.

The film adds a unique perspective to the Leopold and Loeb story, and its approach makes its flaws all the more frustrating. A fascinating contrast with Rope.