Review: Lorena

Lorena **** / *****

Directed by: Joshua Rofé.

 

The thought process behind Amazon’s four-part, four-hour documentary series on Lorena Bobbitt is to try and do the same thing for this infamous case from the 1990s as Ezra Edelman’s masterpiece O.J.: Made in America did for that case. The result isn’t quite as good as that film – which is after all the best documentary of the decade, and one of its best films as well, but it’s still wonderful. I’m not quite sure the larger social issues that the documentary hangs on this case fits together as neatly as the documentary would like you to believe it does, even if those connections are there.

 

In case you aren’t a child of the 1990s, or forget the case in question, the basics are really quite simple. Lorena Bobbitt was a young woman who in 1993 cut off her husband’s penis as he slept, took off in her car, and threw the penis out the window into some tall grass – where it was eventually found, and subsequently reattached – and apparently worked just fine. Lorena, and her husband John Wayne Bobbitt, become media sensations for the tabloid papers – and eventually worldwide news organizations. Even when more details of the case emerged – with Lorena claiming that she suffered years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of John, all of which led her to snap and do what she did, people really never could get over the shock of her actions. It’s not everyday someone gets their penis cut off by their wife after all.

 

Lorena, the documentary, will give you all the details of the case you could ever want. It has interviews with all the key players in it – both Lorena and John extensively. It looks at the investigation, the media sensation around the case – and both trials – John being charged with raping Lorena, Lorena for cutting off John’s penis – and the aftermath for both of them through the years.

 

The lens through which director Joshua Rofe wants to view this case is one of domestic violence – looking at this case as an extreme example of what can happen when the problem isn’t addressed. It’s amazing to see how many states still didn’t think it was a criminal matter if a man raped his wife in the 1990s – and also how little funding there was to help victims of domestic violence. Given this is the lens that the film looks at this case, John Wayne Bobbitt really couldn’t come across any worse than he does here. That’s mainly his own fault however. While he has always said Lorena lied about all that abuse – his actions after all of this surely make you believe her way more than you believe him. His various attempts to “cash-in” on his notoriety never really worked out for him. The fourth hour of the film – that depicts everything he did after, the porn movies, and all the other charges of domestic violence don’t do him any favors, and neither does his excuses for all of them. It’s always someone else’s fault. There is an incredibly sad few minutes where he recounts his own abusive childhood, that may be the only moment in the film you feel truly sorry for him.

 

What the documentary succeeds at is taking you behind the headlines – behind the initial shock value of the act itself, and see the case on a deeper level. Most of the news coverage at the time never even really attempted to do so. It wants you to listen to the various people involved, and perhaps see them not as tabloid figures there to make you laugh – but as genuine people.

 

On that level, I think the film works remarkably well. I think the film strains a little bit when it tries to make larger points on domestic violence policy in America. It’s also odd that the two politicians it focuses on as trying to do something on the issue in the early 1990s were Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders – the two frontrunners for the Democrat Presidential Nomination next year – especially in the same film that sees the Lorena Bobbitt case as an extension of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings – which Biden was largely responsible for (and for which, he gets a pass here). I do think the case is a good one for pointing out the differences between how men and women see things – although not the perfect one that O.J. was for looking at race in America. Hopefully what the film will do is make people see past the jokes – to the very serious case that lied beneath. And the issue that while this is not a perfect representation of, is at least an example to be learned from.