by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Oscar Pistorius: Blade Runner
Killer, made in 2017 by a company called
Thinkfactory Media and released on the Lifetime channel as part of their
current, heavily promoted run of movies based on real-life stories. They kicked
off this series October 28 with Flint, a superb portrayal of the sort of story Lifetime usually stays miles
away from: the deliberate pollution of the water supply of Flint, Michigan by a
state-appointed “emergency manager” who took over from the elected city government
and, purely to save money, ordered Flint’s water source moved from the
relatively clean Lake Huron to the heavily polluted Flint River — and the
resulting deaths and poisonings of Flint residents, including children who
suffered both physical illnesses and learning disabilities from the
lead-tainted water. Though a bit hamstrung by its similarities to Norma
Rae and Erin Brockovich — as if that’s the only way Hollywood knows how to
depict ordinary women heroically mobilizing and standing up to some evil being
perpetrated by the corporate-government complex — Flint was an amazing movie, vividly directed, stunningly
acted and an intense condemnation of the whole calculus of capitalism that puts
profit above people’s lives. Alas, after Flint Lifetime’s “true-life dramas” moved away from social
comment and towards the kinds of sordid sex scandals Lifetime does best. Last
week they ran The Lost Wife of Robert Durst (which I skipped because Charles was home that night
and we ran the Blu-Ray of Wonder Woman instead), yet another Lifetime tale of a husband knocking off his wife
out of jealousy, possessiveness, sheer spite or who knows why — a description
that could apply to Oscar Pistorius: Blade Runner Killer as well. Oscar Pistorius (played in the Lifetime movie
by Andreas Damm) was (is, actually) a white South African who lost both his
legs when he was just 11 months old due to a genetic defect called fibular
hemimelia (yet another one of the beautiful-sounding words the medical industry
cooks up for utterly horrible conditions).
Nonetheless, he became a student
athlete and managed to work his way up to South Africa’s team for the
Paralympics, the Olympic-style international competition for athletes with
disabilities. After beginning as a rugby player and a wrestler, he took up
competitive running in 2004 and, in addition to the prosthetic legs he used in
normal life, he was fitted with a pair of blade-like metal legs for use in
running competitions that earned him the nickname “The Blade Runner.” Then he challenged
the international sporting-world bureaucracy for the right to compete against
able-bodied athletes in the real Olympics — a case he won in 2008, though he
didn’t actually make South Africa’s Olympics team until 2012. Though he didn’t
medal, Pistorius did well enough that he became a South African superstar. The
film covers the four months of his romantic relationship with Reeva Steenkamp
(Toni Garrn, top-billed), an aspiring model whose career took her to Jamaica
and other exotic locations well away from South Africa. Pistorius met her in
October 2013 and within two months they were living together and planning to
build their own house. Then on Valentine’s Day 2014 shots were heard from the
home Pistorius and Steenkamp shared, and it turned out he had shot her. His
defense was that he had thought he heard a prowler breaking into his home and
had shot Reeva thinking she was the prowler. The script by Amber Benson is
structured so that we see the crime both as Pistorius said it happened and as
the police later became convinced it really went down: Pistorius, furious at
Reeva because she had got tired of his neurotic possessiveness and was going to
leave him that night, first fired a pellet from an air gun to warn her not to
go, then put on his standard legs, grabbed a pistol and fired at her through a
locked bathroom door. Oscar Pistorius: Blade Runner Killer was an O.K. movie, obviously treading traditional
Lifetime tropes — nice young woman falls in love with a psycho madman who tries
to control her life, spies on her through social media and a constant stream of
texts, and ultimately kills her when she tries to exit the relationship — and
even following the standard Lifetime cliché that the most attractive man in the
cast list is the psycho killer.
Though we’re left in suspense until close to
the end as to whether we’re supposed to believe Pistorius deliberately killed
Reeva or it was a terrible happenstance — the police finally decide it was
premeditated based on the angle of the bullets from Pistorius’ gun, from which
they deduce that he had put on his prosthetic legs before confronting the
alleged “prowler” and therefore he had shown premeditation — Oscar Pistorius as
depicted in Benson’s script and Norman Stone’s direction shows all the classic
signs of the movie psycho, including not only buying himself a sports car but
driving way too fast and
terrorizing the two passengers we see him with (one of them Reeva, the other a
journalist whom he gave a ride to while the journalist was there to interview
him) that he’s going to lose control of the car and get them both killed. In
one of the film’s nicest scenes from the beefcake point of view, he spots three
shirtless men eyeing Reeva from across the swimming pool at the resort hotel
where they’re staying and chews them out — indicating that he’s got a problem
with jealousy even though he’s
the one messing around, with his former girlfriend (whom we only hear about in
the dialogue) as well as others who are texting or messaging him. About
two-thirds of the way through the film cuts to the sequences of Pistorius’
trial — though we still get some flashbacks about the relationship he had with
Reeva and the evidence that he was basically a human time bomb ready to go off
at any moment — with Reeva’s mother June (Jean Alexander) sitting front and
center in the courtroom and glaring at Oscar almost literally as if looks could
kill. In some ways the Pistorius case was a sort of South African version of O.
J. Simpson: another star athlete pathologically possessive of “his” woman, to
the point of knocking her off rather than risking losing her to someone else.
It was like the Simpson case also — at least, so this film strongly hints — in
the relative leniency with which Pistorius was treated compared with others who
might have committed a similar crime: though the prosecutors had charged him
with murder, he was found guilty only of “culpable homicide” (which I presume
is the South African equivalent of voluntary manslaughter) and sentenced to
just five years in prison. (Incidentally the judge we see in the trial is a
Black woman — proof that sometimes things do change for the better — though the actress playing
the judge is sufficiently light-skinned, about former President Obama’s color,
that it’s possible we were meant to read the judge as “colored,” i.e.
mixed-race, and in the wacky world of apartheid the “colored” weren’t given the full status of
whites but were more privileged and less oppressed than Blacks.)
A series of
post-film titles tells us that Pistorius’ prosecutors appealed the verdict,
saying he should have been convicted of murder (a power American prosecutors
don’t have), and the South African Supreme Court did indeed raise Pistorius’
conviction to murder but still gave him only a six-year sentence. What’s more,
they allowed him to leave prison and serve his sentence under house arrest. The
prosecutors have appealed again, but the final title tells us that if they lose
the appeal Pistorius could be free as early as 2019. Had this been just another
Lifetime movie without the added cachet of a real-life basis, Oscar Pistorius: Blade Runner Killer would have been pretty run-of-the-mill, well acted
by the leads but with uninspired by-the-numbers direction and writing — though
there’s a certain tragedy in the story (athlete who fights a battle with the
authorities in his sport to be allowed to compete at all, thereby inspiring his
country’s population and turning himself into a public hero, then loses it all
over his temper and his psychotic possessiveness) that really pretty much falls
through the cracks in the version we get here. Next week Lifetime is continuing
the cycle of true-life movies with I Am Elizabeth Smart — the nice little mainstream Mormon girl who was
kidnapped and held for nearly a year by a psycho who wanted, according to
Joseph Smith’s original teachings, to make her his second wife — one which was
already done by CBS as a TV-movie, The Elizabeth Smart Story, in 2013!
