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God’s Lonely Man

Scorsese, De Niro, and Paul Schrader buffs will want to check out the documentary The Plot to Kill Reagan.

God's Lonely Man
Photo: Columbia Pictures

Scorsese, De Niro, and Paul Schrader buffs will want to check out the documentary The Plot to Kill Reagan. While it doesn’t exactly resist the cheese factor common to History Channel docs, it does find a fresh way into its chosen topic: demented would-be assassin John Hinckley’s fascination with Taxi Driver the film that he claimed inspired him to stalk star Jodie Foster and hatch a plot to murder President Ronald Reagan.

Mixing talking head interviews, news footage and plentiful re-creations, this special takes the docudrama format about as far as it can go within the History Channel’s narrow stylistic constraints. The true subject isn’t Hinckley’s Foster fixation or his attempt to kill the president, but the interior life of an insane man who wants to fill his empty personality with a beloved onscreen fiction. To that end, the filmmakers mimic iconic scenes and even specific camera moves in their speculative representation of Hinckley’s life, including the famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene, which Hinckley re-stages with a hair dryer instead of a pistol.

To read my Star-Ledger review, click here.

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder and original editor of The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, he is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com and TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com.

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