Movie Review: I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter

I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter

Directed by: Erin Lee Carr.

 

Being a fan of the  True Crime genre can be tricky – as so much of it is exploitive, and is portrayed as simplistic and trashy in an attempt to draw ratings. There is a reason I never watched Nancy Grace when she was on the air, and there is a reason why I more often than not ignore whatever the big case everyone obsessed about at the time is. It’s because for the most part, there is no real analysis going on – no attempt to look at the whole picture, or the larger context around the crimes. Because these cases get so much media attention, they kind of seep into your mind anyway. But it’s usually the case that when everything is said and done, the real portrait has very little to do with the actual crime that has been committed.

 

One such case was the so called Murder by Text case – the one where Michelle Carter was put on trial for texting her boyfriend Conrad Roy as he committed suicide in a Walmart parking lot by carbon dioxide. What seemed like a tragic suicide – something that is sadly all too common among teenagers today – became more complicated when the text messages Michelle Carter sent him in the minutes, hours, days and weeks came out. The text messages are shocking – they read as heartless and cruel, encouraging a young man to kill himself instead of trying to save him. The case became a media sensation largely because Carter looks so young, is attractive, and seems to confirm our sterotypes of teenage girls – that are cruel, heartless and manipulative. It also helps that the people involved are young – all the better to shock the older viewers of shows like Dateline or Nancy Grace – this is a case tailor made to make you shake your head and say “Kids these days”.

 

The truth, of course, is more complicated than those text messages. The texts that we saw are all true – and they are shocking and callous and cruel and there really is no getting around that. And yet, of course, the media chose to focus on the most shocking texts, and not everything else involved in the case.

 

What the film essentially does is turn a case that so many saw as inconceivable into something that makes sense. That doesn’t make it less shocking – it doesn’t excuse what Michelle Carter did. But it does place what happened in its full context. It paints the complex history with mental illness both Carter and Roy had. He had tried previously to kill himself, and failed. The divorce of his parents hit him hard – and there are allegations of domestic violence in his family. To their credit, the Roy family fully participates in the film – and don’t really shy away from some of the uglier aspects of their lives. They are still completely sympathetic – even his father, who did some things that are pretty unforgivable. It also paints a more complex portrait of Carter – as much as the film can, considering that she, her family and her former friends, who testified against her, all declined to participate.

 

What the final portrait shows is that this whole thing is a series of tragic circumstances that simply grew and grew and grew until the tragic result was inevitable. While much of what has been said about Carter is accurate – she did send the texts we all saw, she did seem to revel in the attention of being the girl with the boyfriend who killed himself – there is much more we never knew. How lonely she was – how she tried, and failed, to make friends. How she was delusional in many ways – having trouble telling truth from fiction, and seeing herself in a troubling light.

 

It also makes the case that even though Carter was found guilty – perhaps she shouldn’t have been. Not because ultimately Roy did what he did on his own accord, but because the facts the judge found may well have been faulty. Basically, the judge found that everything Carter did was legal – immoral, but legal – up until Roy got out of his car, and she encouraged him to get back in and finish what he started. The problem is, she apparently did that not over text message, but in a long phone call. We know that call happened – but don’t really know what was said. We know that Carter told him to “Get Back In” – because she admits as much in other texts to her friends in the aftermath of the suicide. And yet in those text messages, there are lots of others things she said that we know are not true. Did she really say it? Or was it just more of a play for attention and sympathy?

 

I Love You, Now Die is the latest film by Erin Lee Carter – who did something similar in two other docs for HBO – one about the “Cannibal Cop” and then in Mommy Dead and Dearest. This is the best one so far from her – and the longest. In two parts, over nearly two and half hours, she lays out the case against Carter in the first part, and her defense in the second. What she does here is invaluable – in that she provides larger context for a case that so many saw as so simple. It wasn’t. You can still hate what Michelle Carter is – you almost certainly will when the documentary is over. But you will understand it more than ever before.