Who knew 2016 would be the year of two remarkable O.J. Simpson retrospectives? A few months ago, FX's "The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" brought fresh relevance to its dramatization of the trial of the century. But as Emmy-worthy as that cable series was, it will rank as the second-best look at Simpson's fall from grace once the documentary series "O.J.: Made in America" debuts at 9 p.m. Saturday on ABC (with subsequent episodes airing on ESPN through June 18).
Enormous in scope and yet laden with specific details, this epic project from the producers of ESPN's "30 for 30" covers Simpson's life in its entirety. It's an arc that soars to the heights of his sports idolatry and then plummets to the incarcerated, repudiated man of today, who's seen in a parole board video reciting his prison good deeds and clinging to his old, beloved image.
Where "The People v. O.J." began with the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and basically ended with Simpson's 1995 acquittal, "O.J.: Made in America" spends the bulk of its first episode in the 1960s, back when a kid from a poor neighborhood of San Francisco got a scholarship to the spa-like campus of the University of Southern California. There, Simpson became a college football hero whose miraculous moves, especially his 64-yard run to win the USC-UCLA grudge match, elevated him to a Heisman Trophy-winning legend.
"If you were a football fan in the late '60s and somebody said to you, 'Do you remember the run?,' it was just one run. It set O.J. apart from everyone," says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote the book that inspired the FX series.
The documentary peels back the layers of Simpson's story and the nation's journey, too. It's like an onion that makes you weep again and again for the persistence of racism, the flawed worship of celebrity, the reinforcing of economic and social divides, the deeply rooted unfairness of the criminal justice infrastructure,and the reluctance to treat domestic violence as a serious problem. If there's a raw, painful chapter of modern American history, it's located somewhere in the book of O.J.
Using more than 70 interviews and a rich trove of archival footage, director Ezra Edelman ventures into the various worlds inhabited by Simpson. The narrative takes lengthy detours into areas like the migration of black Southerners to Los Angeles, but it all accumulates into a powerful narrative that puts Simpson in the context of the turbulence of the times. One example? An aerial shot of the Los Angeles Coliseum is paired with an explanation of how the site of his college football triumphs was next to a pristine, nearly all-white campus on one side and poverty-riddled,predominantly African-American neighborhoods on the other.
While Watts burned and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, as the film illustrates, Simpson was becoming a nonthreatening, apolitical national star. Great athletes like Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then going by the name Lew Alcindor) stood up publicly against discrimination, but Simpson chose to embrace the fact that his white fans didn't think of him as black. As a white Simpson friend says at one point, "If you're a celebrity, you have no color."
Simpson's own racial disconnect is one thread in a documentary that's not afraid to remember just how popular he was. There are displays of Simpson's generosity, like his insistence on being interviewed alongside his Buffalo Bills teammates after breaking the NFL's 2,000-yard rushing record. The recounting of Simpson's spokesman contract with Hertz is given its groundbreaking due, as are his efforts to be a serious actor in movies like the conspiracy drama "Capricorn One."
By the time the specifics of his repeated domestic abuse are revealed, the story reaches familiar territory for anyone who closely followed Simpson's trial. The film's breadth forces you to consider not only the violence, but also how many people (including those in law enforcement) knew the facts and yet couldn't — or didn't — protect Nicole Brown Simpson, who left behind written accounts that described the beatings.
"O.J.: Made in America" gives voice to the sadness of a story that, no matter what avenues are explored, always ends up with the brutal deaths of two people. But this brilliant, devastating documentary knows that there is shared guilt and shame here on several levels. To borrow the classic line from Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar," the fault, dear America, is not in our stars, but at least some of it is in ourselves.
Source :http://www.freep.com/
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