Bostonians prefer not to talk about their city’s ugly history of discrimination: the institutional expansions that have threatened its Chinatown neighborhood since the 1920s, the 1970s busing crisis, the racist crap its population of rabid sports fans spew at visiting basketball teams’ Black players at TD Garden. Matt Ruskin’s new film Boston Strangler dramatizes ugly history of a different sort: the reign of the title serial killer, who during the early 1960s took the lives of 13 women unhindered by authorities, and whose identity is canopied by a question mark.
To address the ugliness of this chapter in Boston’s past, Ruskin adopts a needlessly ugly style. According to his camera, 1960s Boston’s architecture and landscape were both drained of nearly all traces of color, replaced by a dreariness that perhaps explains why being devoutly miserable is a birthright for locals as much as an unhealthy loyalty to Dunkin Donuts. Gray and sepia tones pervade nearly every single shot, announcing too much of what’s already clear through his material. As with Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, the straightforwardly stomach-churning and sorrowful elements of the film’s story should speak for themselves. The killer’s (or killers’) active years were a time of justified paranoia and pervasive fear for women; any stranger claiming the building super sent him to check the radiator might be the Grim Reaper in a maintenance suit.
In other words, it’s okay for a film about that figure, and about the panic that blanketed Boston during their murder spree, to occasionally indulge a splash of color here and there in its frames. The overwhelming visual reminders, meant to impress upon the audience both the period setting and a sense of realism, aren’t necessary. Boston Strangler doesn’t need the somber tones to convince of its seriousness, with Ruskin focusing on neither the killer (or, again, killers) or the ignoble bumbling schmucks at the Boston Police Department, but rather the brave journalists responsible for investigating this ugly case.
The real-life journalists portrayed here are both women: Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) and Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley), a reporter so determined to nail the Strangler to the walls that she weathered the frustration of her boss at the Record American, the apparent composite character Jack Maclaine (Chris Cooper); the Attorney General (Robert John Burke); her husband James (Morgan Spector); and of course the BPD, represented by Commissioner McNamara (Bill Camp), a grouchy, withholding prick who’d rather people die than accept accountability for his officers’ inability to find their asses with both hands. By happy fate, the detail of Loretta and Jean’s gender dovetails nicely with what Ruskin makes into his running theme: How the atmosphere that settled over Boston during these years affected women, even hard-nosed journalists on the Strangler’s trail, and made the thought of being alone anywhere into a trigger for mortal terror.