Soaked In Bleach

Nick Broomfield’s 1998 documentary Kurt & Courtney was a rambling, low-fi examination of the supposed suicide of Kurt Cobain that  inconclusively pointed the finger at Courtney Love as directly or indirectly responsible for the singer’s death. Benjamin Statler’s film has more resources applied to it but the effect is pretty much the same albeit stopping just short of accusing Love of having her husband killed.

The film’s argument derives from the material supplied by private investigator Tom Grant, who in classic film noir manner was hired a few days before Cobain’s body was found by Love and now believes that he was used as a distraction for her heinous intent.  Much of the film depends on Grant’s recordings of telephone conversations with Love and others, sometimes murkily and seemingly pointlessly re-enacted, and interviews with him and various talking heads that all lead to the conclusion that the investigation of Cobain’s death was shoddily handled by the Seattle police and that Love who was on the verge of being divorced by Cobain stood to inherit tens of millions (even a billion dollar estate, one journalist claims) of dollars.

The trouble with Statler’s approach is that it is so tendentious that it undermines any credibility there might be in its arguments (why one asks is Grant still beating his drum 20 years after Cobain’s death?).  Compared to Andrew Jarecki’s revelatory investigation of multi-millionaire murderer Robert Durst in The Jinx, Soaked In Bleach is little better than a pious smear campaign. Truth is a notoriously elusive commodity and hard to come by but such should be the documentarian’s talisman. On this view, Love’s charmless personality and admittedly substantial motive notwithstanding, Soaked In Bleach fails to convince us of much more than the Seattle police's breath-taking ignorance of grunge music.

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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