What the documentary does best, for me at least, is capture familial messiness, betrayals, slights and secrets. What’s more fruitful is Hamburg’s attempt to understand his mother’s life - not just her death - and all of the estrangements within his family. Sure, therapy might be more efficient, but there’s even some of that here, delivered by an unexpected source. ![]() Or you could accept the stumbling, and the time it absorbs, as something that reflects on the difficulty of what Hamburg is attempting. If there’s an entire episode dedicated to Connecticut’s brief infatuation with the Ponzi scheme known as “gifting tables” and that full hour yields nothing of probative value? You could blame HBO for not telling the director, “This is way too long already, trim it.” You could cynically feel that the “secret society” aspect of the gifting tables probably reminded some HBO executive of a cult and they hoped audiences would get NXIVM vibes. If you just embrace the clunkiness of Hamburg’s amateur sleuthing, the dead-ends and misdirections take on a charm of their own. Filmmaking is in his blood and his childhood is all on video and the Beach side of the family was dedicated to home movies, but what sense can you make of your identity when the happy footage from holidays and celebrations and childhood milestones seems entirely disconnected from a history of alcoholism, divorce and spousal abandonment? How do you use the technology that created an illusion of perfect suburban community to solve a murder, crack a corporate scandal, expose demons and addictions? That, of course, is not the confusion Madison (Zac Efron would be wise to acquire the narrative rights given the physical resemblance) is trying to make sense of. It’s nobody’s fault, but it’s very confusing at times. And it’s nobody’s fault that the crime took place on Middle Beach Road and Barbara’s maiden name and the name of many of her relatives is “Beach,” nor that the Connecticut town’s name is Madison and our filmmaker/protagonist’s name is Madison. Note: Barbara is part of a family line of Barbaras, including Madison’s grandmother, who appears in the documentary. The day of her murder was supposed to be a key court date for Barbara in her acrimonious divorce from Jeffrey, a former energy industry multi-millionaire and accused financial fraudster, who has also naturally been a target of some suspicion. The body was found by Madison’s sister Ali and his aunt Conway, who have both been targets of some suspicion. ![]() Hamburg was 18 at the time, away at college. Indeed, Hamburg’s mother Barbara was brutally murdered in 2010 outside of her home in coastal Connecticut. ![]() “When people get to adulthood, they get to meet their parents as human beings and I didn’t have that,” Hamburg muses toward the end of the first hour of Murder on Middle Beach.
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