movie reviews
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father
When Andrew Bagby was killed on November 5th 2001, he left behind much more than his memory. Childhood friend and filmmaker Kurt Kuenne set out to create a loving documentary about Bagby that illustrated the life of his quirky friend for the child he left behind, Zachary. The result, Dear Zachary, is as an emotionally captivating snapshot, seven years in the making, that examines Bagby’s life and death through Kuenne’s all-encompassing lens.
Bordering on journalism, Dear Zachary comprehensively interviews nearly everyone in Bagby’s sphere to create a full picture of the man who once starred in Kuenne’s childhood films. Bagby made a exceptional bad guy on Kuenne’s prototypical home movies, but in real life he was a really good guy. He was once a med student in Canada, he gave great wedding toasts, and everyone had a funny story about him. But it was the brutal story of his murder that left his friends and family reeling.
On a November day, Shirley Turner, a much older woman Bagby recently dumped, allegedly shot him in a park, ending his life at the age of 32. His death opened a new chapter for those around him. For Bagby’s parents, his death catalyzed their own struggles with the legal system to hold the woman accountable for her actions and vindicate the memory of their son. They achingly discover new meaning in their own lives as court dates fly by and Turner is released on bail. Then she drops the bombshell: she’s pregnant with Bagby’s baby.
For Kuenne, his cross-country memorial to Bagby evolves into an evisceration of Bagby’s killer and an indictment of the Canadian legal system’s failure to keep Turner from future violence. Through countless interviews, camcorder home videos, and exhaustive legal explorations, Dear Zachary investigates the interconnectedness of friendships and family, and examines how we know the people we know. It also dissects the nature of grief through Kuenne’s visual and literal narrative. Kuenne himself enters the story as someone suffering, too—someone who, like Bagby’s parents, is trying to make sense of it all. As he says, “This is my last movie with Andrew.”
Although Dear Zachary mainly focuses on Bagby’s parents’ inexhaustible thirst for justice and limitless capacity to bear a weighty emotional burden, Kuenne’s own pain sometimes takes the movie off message. Instead of just telling the story, his own attempts to drive a point home through visual quirkiness and stylistic nuance lessen the impact of the film. Kuenne’s sharp editing style, which sometimes borders on cheesy news magazine shows a la A Current Affair, moves the film along quickly but at times feels more like his home movies than a feature film. Despite a little slight case of melodrama and sensationalism, the true story of Bagby and the emotional strength of his parents is a compelling insight into the endurance of the human soul.
—Drew Tewksbury,
Artist Direct 11.19.08
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