It features all the tropes of the "true crime" format, but takes it to the next level with an unusually elegant narrative and slick editing, elevating a genre that has, more often than not, been defined by risibly low-budget recreations of real crimes.
The series marshals the full complement of documentary techniques... to recreate the "life and deaths" of its subject while maintaining a certain cautious detachment.
If you have any interest in true-crime stories, I'd imagine The Jinx will satisfy your craving sumptuously. If, like me, you're skeptical of the genre, The Jinx might make you rethink the worthiness of it. Me, I'm now a convert.
The Jinx fascinates. Even though I know there's unlikely to be a real period at the end of this story, I'm curious to see where Jarecki puts the ellipsis.
The Jinx very much looks like a masterwork of the true crime genre. Its first two chapters establish an iron grip. The final four can't come fast enough.
Robert Durst comes off here as smart, which also could be seen as calculating. His résumé suggests he has covered some bad road, and while no one would mistake him for a poor little rich boy based on this film, it's easy to understand how he has survived.
Durst emerges as a slippery, damaged and manipulative figure, and it is hard to tell whether his involvement is driven by a desire to control the story or to surrender to it, to lie or to confess, to be relieved of his fictions or to perpetuate them.
It's the ultimate in reality television... But Andrew Jarecki accomplished even more... He created a new version of true-crime television, exploring an unresolved case in a series centered on interviews with the eccentric, self-destructive prime suspect.
