Last month, we here at Lucid Forge made a pretty big deal about the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. Of course, August ’09 was also the anniversary of an entirely different event in the Summer of ’69 that had absolutely nothing to do with peace and love. On August 8th, 1969, several members of the Manson Family, a commune on the outskirts of Los Angeles run by the magnetic Charles Manson, strolled into the home of filmmaker Roman Polanski and killed his wife actress Sharon Tate along with three others. A few days later, “The Family” as they became known as, struck again, killing the LaBiancas.
The lives of Manson and his followers leading up to, including and after their killing spree have been studied and dissected for four decades now, most famously in the book and TV miniseries of the same name called Helter Skelter. But where as those projects tried very hard to “stick to the script” and portray the events as they happened, director Reginald Harkema’s new film, Leslie, My Name is Evil, takes a very, shall we say, subversive approach to the Manson mythos. Harkema uses the trial of Manson and the members of his family as a means of exploring the culture wars in the United States; the timeless clash not between whites and blacks as Manson had predicted, but the conservatives and the liberals.
So, this is not a historically reflexive look at the Manson case. The man himself, as portrayed with magnetic craze by Ryan Robbins, can almost come across as a caricature, but then you might be missing the point as Harkema giddily plays with camp and melodrama. I think one has to be fairly open-minded to follow where Leslie leads. The Leslie of the title refers to Leslie Van Houten. Of the three family members tried with Manson it was believed that Van Houten was the least committed to Manson, and was in fact only involved with the murders of the LaBiancas. There’s a kind of striking physical resemblance between actress Kristen Hager and the real life Van Houten, which takes her performance to a bizarre level of mimic that’s at once funny and little disturbing.
Again though, this isn’t really biography, although Van Houten’s life before Manson is briefly examined. In a way, the movie Leslie is about perception and our perception of Leslie is formed a lot through Perry (Gregory Smith), a college student that, in the movie at least, is on her trial jury. Perry is uptight, ambitious and Christian. He’s dad, played by the always tremendous Peter Keleghan, is pretty gung ho about shipping his son off to Vietnam to kill some [racial expletive deleted]. Perry’s not so sure obviously. He’s a good boy, and wants to stay in America, work as a chemical nerd for some company and marry his chaste, strictly Christian girlfriend Dorothy (Kristin Adams).
It’s though Perry’s perceptions that most of the cultural clash takes place. He can’t take his eyes off Leslie during the trial and has bizarre murderous though erotic dreams about her while sequestered in his hotel room (obviously Dorothy being devout puts a cramp in his sex life till the honeymoon). This potent cauldron of living the straight and narrow while being tempted by the free love and human drive represented by those that followed Manson is where the thematic heart of Leslie lies. Both are extremes, but these are the extremes that drive us, and its all wrapped up in the fascination about a girl from a good home, and a good family and on the orders of one man walked into someone else’s home and stabbed them 51 times. It makes you think, it makes you cringe and it makes you laugh. Harkema called his film a love note to America, and while they may not share the sentiment, the emotion is real.
