r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 I watched a Lifetime movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good: The Gabby Petito Story, a much-hyped story about the monumentally dysfunctional relationship between Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie (that really was his name!), which ended when he murdered her during a cross-country trip they took from Florida, his home region (his parents lived there and according to the movie that’s where they left from on their trip, though a Behind the Leadlines documentary shown afterwards said they left from her home region in New York), to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, where he killed her and then drove the van back to Florida alone. Thora Birch, usually an actress, directed the film and also appeared in it as Nicholle Schmidt, Gabby Petito’s mother. (Gabby’s parents divorced and both remarried, and there’s a funny scene in the script where Brian has dinner with all of Gabby’s parents and she jokes about having two moms and two dads.) Though a woman directed this film, it was written by two men – Richard Blaney and Gregory Small – but they did a great job of showing how Gabby and Brian got together and how their relationship evolved over the two years they were together. Gabby was killed in September 2021 and the date is important because her trip was heavily documented on social media, both her own video blog (“vlog”) and other people’s. Ini fact, it’s arguable that Brian might never have been caught if he’d committed his crime in the pre-social media age, since he killed Gabby in an especially out-of-the-way location. Given that he was from Florida, she was from New York and the crime took place in Wyoming, the Federal Bureay of Investigation (FBI) took jurisdiction because there wasn’t any local authority which could claim it.
The FBI agent who took charge of the case was a Black woman named Shaw (Matisha Baldwin,who turns in a properly authoritative performance) who worked out of the Bureau’s offices in Long Island, and she was able to coordinate and gather information from various social-media contacts. The key people who provided the clue were a straight couple named Kyle and June Bethune, who responded to a nationwide call for information about the case and reviewed their own video footage from the part of the park where Gabby Petito had last been seen. The Bethunes, who consider themselves part of the “van culture” that was celebrated in the 2020 Academy Award-winning film Nomadland and saw Gabby as part of their community whom they had an obligation to protect, spotted the Laundrie-Petito van in some of their video footage and reported its location to the FBI, which allowed law enforcement in general to zero in on the part of the park where Brian had buried Gabby’s body after he killed her. For me, though, the best part of the film was the long,slow build-up to the final confrontation, in which Brian and Gabby meet – or rather re-meet, since they knew each other when she was still in high school and he was too scared to approach her. He was also convinced that she already had a boyfriend named Steve, but when they finally hooked up years later when Gabby was in her early 20’s she explained that she and Steve had just been friends because Steve was Gay.
LGabby and Brian start dating and sharing a bed, but soon Brian, who’s been sorta-kinda pursuing a career as a landscaper but really hasn’t knuckled down to do the work, announces that he’ll be moving to Florida within the month to move back in with his parents because he’s not making enough money to survive on his own., Gabby impulsively offers to move with him, figuring they can both find jobs and make enough money to afford their own place, and they both get jobs at a local supermarket in Florida until Gabby lands a more high-paying and more fun job at an ice cream parlor. Brian gets incensed that she won’t be working for the same employer as he, and he gets even more upset when she uses a friend-matching service to hook up with a woman named Rose (Monica Moore Smith). The two of them go out together to dance clubs, since Brian has no interest in dancing, until one night when Gabby is carded at the door, reaches for her I.D. and finds she doesn’t have it. Brian, without telling her, had stolen it out of her purse and thus prevented her from going on her “friend date” with Rose. That should have been enough of a warning for her to get out of that relationship and head back to Long Island and the friends she had walked out on to be with Brian, but he keeps getting neurotically possessive. There are several dark references to him being off his meds, and her pressuring him to get back on them, which is the one indication we have that Brian had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness and requires professional care.
LFinally the two go off on their great adventure, and though Brian wants to do it in their existing car, the more practical Gabby buys a small van and outfits it herself with a built-in table for eating and a mini-bed to sleep in. At one point there’s an altercation between Gabby and Brian that attracts the attention of lae enforcement. A couple of passers-by take out their smartphones and record the argument between Gabby and Brian, including Gabby hitting him and him belting her a good one in the face in retaliation. The pacers-by call 911, but when the cops separate them for their interviews Gabby admits she hit Brian first and the police thus decide that she is the aggressor and he the voctim. They order them to separate for 24 hours and Gabby is briefly tempted to get into the van, drive home and leave Brian to fend for himself and figure out how to get home on his own. But, alas for her eventual fate, she has second thoughts and is there to meet Brian again when the 24 hours are up. Eventually, after a series of further arguments, they end up in Wyoming, and two days later Brian returns home to Florida in the van but without Gabby. The cops are immediately suspicious of him – as we hear from several characters at different times, if two people set off on a trip and only one returns, the cops are going to suspect that the survivor killed his companion along the way.
LThe last half-hour shows the ending of the story including the discovery of Gabby’s remains thanks to the tip the Bethunes gave them the clue,the decision of Brian’s parents to stop stonewalling lae enforcement and start cooperating with them; and the finale, in which Brian’s parents identify the patch of Florida wilderness where Brian used to go and the cops finally find him … dead. He committed suicide after leaving behind a notebook in which he wrote a self-serving account of Gabby’s death in which he said he had killed her after she’d had a serious injury and begged him to put her out of her misery. The film concludes with a conjectural reconstruction of how the murder might have gone down, in which Gabby tells Brian that as soon as they get back to civilization she’s going to leave him and drive back to Long Island in the van while he can find his own way back home – exactly what she considered doing earlier on – and he reacts by grabbing her and eventually strangling her in a rage. Since both Gabby and Brian were dead, this is pure conjecture on the part of writers Blaney and Small, though it’s at least conceivable given what we’ve seen so far about Brian’s character and in particular his intense jealousy and possessiveness.
LThe Gabby Petito Story is presented as, among other things, a cautionary tale warning women involved in this kind of abusive relationship with a man to get the hell out of it as soon as they can, and the post-film documentary featured an interview with a British woman named Laurie Richards who described Brian as a classic abuser, using strategies of social control to dominate his partner until he ultimately killed her. There are other intriguing interviews, including with a New York friend of Gabby’s named Nikki Passennante who, alas, is not depicted in the film, and a filmmaker named “Swoon,” a woman with long blue-green hair. Both of them claim they are in abusive relationships themselves and got otu of them, but their own experiences with bad men gave them a point of identification with what Gabby had gone through. Director Thora Birch said that one of her motives for making this film was to ensure that no woman ever again meets the sort of fate Gabby Petito did – which of course is preposterous. No one is going to stop the human reproductive system from making either abusive men or vulnerable women (and these kinds of relationships exist in other pairings as well: there have been both Gay men and Lesbians who have ended up in relationships like this, as well as straight couples in which the women was the abuser and the man the victim). But The Gabby Petitu Story is a quite well-done tale of one abusive relationship and the bad end it brought to both participants, and it moved me in ways I hadn’t really expected it to.
