MINISERIES PREMIERE: This documentary miniseries, which will run for six weeks in one-hour chunks on HBO, is Andrew Jarecki’s nonfiction examination of Robert Durst, the wealthy New York real-estate heir accused of one murder and suspected of several. Jarecki made a fictional feature film inspired by one Durst case, 2010’s
All Good Things, but this is a nonfiction treatment. And it’s an amazing one, because Durst, after seeing the fictional film, contacted Jarecki, and eventually agreed to be interviewed by Jarecki– for the first time by anyone – about his life and alleged crimes. HBO provided only the first two episodes for preview, and this story unspools slowly and deliberately, so I’m not sure how it ends, or exactly what it amounts to, at this point. But it starts with hypnotic pull, slowly probing into its conflicting and conflicted story lines – part
The Thin Blue Line, part
Serial, part
The Staircase. And with Durst on camera, a presence whose monotone makes everything he says sound a little creepy (“Nobody tells the
whole truth”),
The Jinx is definitely worth a sampling. For a full review, see Ed Bark’s
Uncle Barky’s Bytes.