After Matthew Shepard’s murder, lines were clearly drawn: you were either on Matthew’s side, and therefore occupying the moral and intellectual high ground, or you were a redneck bible basher spewing hate and ignorance. Though the former group assumed they were doing the right thing, Shepard was in fact violated by both sides equally, as they each snatched up the circumstances of his life and murder, made him either a martyr or a demon respectively, and distorted the facts willy nilly to add grist to their own mills.

Shepard was the victim of a cruel and horrific crime, but his homosexuality, no matter what part it played in provoking his assailants’ violent fury, had nothing, really, to do with his extremely unlikely and unfortunate fate. As Camille Paglia has noted, doe-eyed and slight Shepard was not a gay Jesus, but a person living in a rough part of the country who lucked out big time chasing after some fun with some hot, dangerous guys. In life, Matthew Shepard was not a walking vessel of gay rights, and he certainly wasn’t a poster boy for small town America. 

So it was vicarious opportunism when urban gay men and urban gay activists, who would shriek in mock horror at the very suggestion of a weekend in the boondocks, and who would never step one foot into the kind of gay-hostile bar Shepard frequented, claimed brotherhood with St. Shepard.

On the other hand, it was just as unbelievable when rural Americans or Laramites claim to have lost a son when Shepard died, as Shepard had, reportedly, been barely noticed in Laramie before his death. I was brought up in an Australian coal mining town, and I know that it’s disingenuous and optimistic to claim that rural people anywhere in the Western World are comfortable and familiar with homosexuality. Though he may have enjoyed a clandestine friendship here and there, Shepard would not have been a welcome representative of the town.

The response to Shepard's murder was nauseatingly pat and has been unrelentingly so ever since. The gay response in particular was to jettison thought and complexity in favour of quasi-religious blind devotion to a new Jesus, behaviour described by Paglia as “a simplistic melodrama of virtue versus villainy … (pumping) the public discourse full of intelligence-insulting schmaltz” (source). Unfortunately, this Sunday School approach infects The Laramie Project, a docudrama about Shepard's shell-shocked home town, which, despite some powerful moments and an earnest heart, is intellectually, emotionally and cinematically one dimensional.

The film begins with stirring music that plays over dissolving shots of long highways and a quiet little town going about it's business. Laura Linney, the first of an endless line of famous faces, appears as a yokel. Like the whole ensemble, she delivers her lines straight down the barrel of the camera lens, looking right at you and saying "Nobody duh-suhvs thayt, I don’t care who-oo y’ar". Camryn Manheim’s up next, playing a school teacher, followed soon by Steve Buscemi, who appears to be some kind of mechanic, or maybe he’s a farmer fixing his own tractor.

Excessively schmicko camera work offers perfectly composed shots of breathtaking Rockies scenery, or indoor “interview” scenes which place performers front and centre in warm and comforting studies and kitchens. With the volume turned down, the film could be a recruitment video for a religious cult, or a series of TV commercials for Nescafe. 

With the volume turned up, we’re reminded that real people don’t talk like actors. They don't hit their marks in sentences, they don't pause for effect in the right places, they don't furnish their speech with appropriate facial expressions and hand gestures.  The well-trained actors of The Laramie Project are talented and capable, but their professional diction prevents them from believability as the population of a Wyoming town.  Actually, the film is more like a documentary about the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, held for security reasons in a remote rural town, with everyone in a strangely downcast and reflective mood - like as if James Woods or someone has unexpectedly died five minutes before the camera crew arrived.

Scenes are short, are placed back to back with little use of fading or transition devices, and jump from one of the too-many characters to another with no entry or leave time. So, we know who the sympathetic characters are, and who the villains are, straight away, from the second they open their mouths, which is usually the same second they appear on the screen. It’s a little like flipping through a picture book, and instead of feeling realistic and earthy - which it should, given it’s docudrama, scripted with the very words of the locals - is disjointed, fake and plastic. Ten minutes in, you’re craving real documentary that features real Laramie locals, ones that don’t look like Christina Ricci, and the end of the incessant string score that speeds the whole boring thing along.

Bad acting is unfortunately common - highlighting the false confidence and rushed feel of the whole production. Jeanne Garofalo, Steve Buscemi and so on are as good as they usually are. Everyone else, though, pretty much totally sucks. Eyebrows furrow to show interest, hands go to lips to show shock and sorrow, heads shake slowly to show dismay, and those playing the irritatingly quirky posse of New York film makers chuckle respectfully in unison when Laramites relate quaint local attitudes.

A sterling film - a cross between Boys Don’t Cry, Deliverance, and Ode to Billy Joe - lies somewhere in the story of Matthew Shepard, but that film is yet to be made.

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