I nearly didn't watch this extraordinary documentary -- seven and a half hours shown over five nights -- thinking can I really be bothered watching a story that has been newsworthy for decades. However since the film has been widely hailed as a masterpiece, "the ultimate documentary", I thought I should give it a go. It was well worth the effort, as compulsive viewing as the best thrillers, even if it was nearly impossible to emerge from the experience with any doubts regarding that fateful night when O.J.'s abused, white wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered.
Film-maker Ezra Edelman has taken the time to examine the background of his subject in detail and has called upon both archive footage and current interviews with dozens of the dramatis personae. Little in the end is left to the imagination and the viewer knows all he needs know to make up his own mind. What we have is akin to a modern Greek tragedy, a potentially great hero undone by his hubris and falling in the end to unimagined depths. There is little doubt that Simpson was an icon to many as a sporting superman, turning his fame into riches through sponsorship, personal appearances, and movie roles. He seemed charming, kind and infallible, with a life that could only continue to move happily forward -- but personality flaws became his downfall.
At the height of his fame his endless ego and self-confidence created a sense of invulnerability and untouchability. When invited to add his weight to the civil rights movement, he declined, announcing that his fame and status were nothing whatsoever to do with his racial identity. He was O.J. -- the Juice -- deserving of his celebrity status. However when he was arrested for murder, after a day-long, knuckle-chewing flight, staged for his ever-growing flock of supporters, his identity as a black man became paramount to his defence team of high-powered lawyers. Having been warned by the (it would seem) easily-led presiding judge, who no doubt was considering his own future, not to play the 'race card', this is precisely what they did; they even invited the largely black jury into Simpson's home, replacing the many photos of him with white celebrities with more appropriate black ones. Eventually the long, long trial became an indictment of the city of Los Angeles, its historically racist police department, and one purportedly racist cop who could have planted evidence. They were on trial, not the defendant whom the incontrovertible evidence alone should have convicted. His lawyers turned the courtroom into a media circus, making the prosecutors look inept, as they defended the wealthy man who could afford the legal costs of some $50,000 a day.
In the end the jury, after only a few hours deliberation, acquitted Simpson of murder to the jubilation of the black community. To them this was payback for the Rodney King affair and a thousand other indignities. They didn't give a damn if he was guilty or not; all that mattered is that a black man won a long overdue victory. To the white community, O.J. was a man who got away with murder. The division was wider than ever! A civil suit by the Goldmans resulted in a 'guilty' verdict with an order for him to pay 33 million in damages, and his life became a spiral into deceit and decadence thereafter. He could still put on the smiling charm when it suited him to do so, but the days when he was an infallible hero, to be put on a pedestal and worshipped, were long gone.
Currently he is serving a 33-year jail sentence on charges of robbery, kidnap, and threat of violence which frankly seems like overkill on the part of the sentencing Las Vegas judge. Whatever his flaws this 'poetic justice' is probably uncalled for and ridiculously punitive.. I suspect that many people now feel sorry for him, a sorrow that a golden life could end in such ignominy. There is probably little further drama to emerge from this very sad tale that has absorbed the public for the best part of fifty years and which Edelman has so brilliantly chronicled.
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