Laramie Project, The  B-
By Kage Alan

“The Laramie Project” is a film based on transcripts of over 200 interviews with the people of Laramie, Wyoming, where 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was murdered. With the assistance of the Tectonic Theatre Project, writer/director Moisés Kaufman later turned those transcripts into a play and then finally a film. This is not a recreation of the events leading up to and including the murder nor is it a TV movie of the week. Instead of coming up with a script based on the transcripts, the script IS the transcripts with recreations of the interviews using actors, some of who are extremely high caliber. The basic idea is to show the attitudes of those in the town during Matthew’s hospitalization once his body was discovered, after he passes away, during the trial and then even after that.

While some of the cast members are able to make their words look and feel as if they are their own, the rest of the cast either treats it like a play or comes across looking like they are reciting dialogue somebody else spoke. It makes for a very uneven viewing experience during the first 45 minutes. I wanted to invest myself emotionally, yet couldn’t overcome the sense that I was watching someone acting instead of someone feeling. What helps “The Laramie Project” along is its usage of archive footage, which it could have used a great deal more of. That was raw emotion. That was someone feeling instead of reciting and it added a dimension the film would totally have missed out on had they not bothered with it. In the end, half of the film works and half of it doesn’t, but enough of the message gets through; murder is murder, families and communities get torn apart, there’s a need for recognizing what happened and speaking out about it and we must learn to appreciate life itself, not base our opinions solely on who someone is attracted to. There is hope, though, and “The Laramie Project” lets us know that hope exists.