Poor Man’s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Soaked in Bleach is just missing that stunning bit of luck that turned the ending of The Jinx into a phenomenon
★★★★☆
The year was 2001. The place was suburban Washington. The more specific place was a middle school hallway during 2nd lunch period. I picked up the pay phone and fed it my quarters. I contacted the operator and asked to be patched through to the mayor of Seattle. I reached an answering machine. The mayor must have also had 2nd lunch. “This is a call from Concerned Citizen. Re-open the Cobain case.” And I hung up the phone and went to the gymnasium to wait out the rest of the period.
I’m sure my sixth antics were the impetus for David assigning me Soaked in Bleach. Soaked in Bleach is a 2015 documentary focusing on the inconsistencies surrounding the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. The movie hinges on the records of private investigator Tom Grant. Grant finds himself at the center of a classic noir storyline. Grant was actually hired by Courtney Love in the days before the discovery of Cobain’s body in his Lake Washington home. But, like all noir stories, as he begins his investigation, not everything is as it first appears. Grant serves as a vehicle to lay out the most common issues with the Cobain’s alleged suicide and as a central character through which we can rediscover this 1994 case.
I grew up a Cobain conspiracy theorist. I moved to Washington in 2000 and started listening to Nirvana in 2001. They were one of the first bands I ever loved that I learned about from someone other than my parents. I had also just gotten my first home internet connection. There was no Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, and so back in those days, I’d stumble my way onto conspiracy theory sites about the death of Kurt Cobain. Since then, I have always been able to spout back all of the issues with the evidence, the faulty proceedings of Seattle PD, and all of the other common theories of what actually happened. Very few of you will be in that same situation, and so Soaked in Bleach makes an excellent introductory course for those who are unaware of the mystery surrounding Cobain’s death. I didn’t learn very many new things, but I did meet Tom Grant, the soft spoken private investigator at the center of this case, and that made this worth watching.
As far as actual filmmaking goes, this is a pretty standard documentary. It involves a fair amount of talking heads and a lot of dramatic reenactments. These aren’t History-Channel-bad reenactments either — the acting is of some quality, but there is only so much drama a reenactment can bring to a documentary. The most fascinating things about this movie is that Tom Grant recorded almost every interaction he had during his investigation on cassette tape. The movie uses these as lead ins to most of the reenactments, going from the real voice of Grant and Love to the actors playing them in the scene. This was an interesting technique I had not seen in a documentary before, but it actually served to hurt the film’s air of credibility at certain times. Not every scene opened with an audio recording, and I found myself wondering about the ones that didn’t. Were they also recorded on tape or did Grant just recite this scene from memory? It made it hard to trust the scenes that weren’t actually bookended by the recordings.
What stops this from being a great movie is the same thing that holds back lots of documentaries — bias. Benjamin Statler clearly is very passionate about this case. He must have had a childhood full of the same websites I used to visit. This was never going to be a film that examined both sides of an issue. Courtney Love would want nothing to do with this movie (in fact, she sent a cease and desist) and the way it portrays her. But, for all the bias, Statler does a great job of letting the facts speak for themselves without adding too much fuel to the conspiracy theory fire. There are very few accusations of what actually happened. Statler and Grant don’t spend time with libelous theories or try to push their own beliefs of what transpired, and instead focus on the things that probably did not happen as the story was widely reported. They did manage to refresh all my old beliefs about the Cobain case and instill me with a few new ones. All in all, Soaked in Bleach is a must-watch for Nirvana fans and a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon for anyone.
Soaked in Bleach is available to stream on Hulu.
Next week, David is finally going to sit down and watch him some American History X. Edward Norton is my favorite actor, and hopefully watching this movie will help David get a better grasp on why. I don’t know what he does and doesn’t know about this movie, but I’m hoping that he doesn’t know many spoilers that might… curb… his enthusiasm. Check back next Tuesday to find out.
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