The Many Flaws of Netflix's Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story

Primetimer editor-at-large Sarah D. Bunting knows a thing or two about true crime. She founded the true crime site The Blotter, and is the host of its weekly podcast, The Blotter Presents. Her new weekly column here on Primetimer is dedicated to all things true crime on TV.

At first, Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story seems like your garden-variety true crime documentary. It begins with a montage of footage and interviews summarizing the story and the issues it's addressing; various chyrons locate you in the narrative, which takes place over a decade-and-a-half, from Brown's 2004 arrest on murder and other charges at age 16, to the end of last year. Brown used various credible affirmative defenses — diminished capacity; self-defense; ineffective assistance of counsel when she was a juvenile — to assert that she shouldn't do life for killing the man three times her age to whom she'd been pimped out, and she's onscreen a great deal, sitting for interviews and allowing access to her psychological evaluations and legal team. And Murder to Mercy has a built-in suspenseful element as well, because the main thrust of the doc's narrative is Brown's quest for post-conviction relief or a grant of clemency from the governor of Tennessee.

Despite all this, Murder to Mercy doesn't hang together very well. That's not to say that it's bad or that it's boring (it's not), but it's got a couple of major problems.

The first is director Daniel H. Birman's track record with this very subject. Birman already directed a documentary about Brown called Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story, which you may have seen on PBS's Independent Lens in 2011. I hesitate to mention this, because once you know that that other project exists, you may find it as distracting as I did that THIS documentary isn't more transparent — like, at all — about how much the first one informed it, how much footage Birman might have repurposed, and so on. There isn't anything wrong with reusing interviews or reshaping a previous story that, well, ended before it had a "real" ending; Brown's case is in entirely different place than it was nearly a decade ago. But why not add on-screen mention of the first documentary's role in not just the second one, but the case itself? One of Brown's attorneys had Birman's first movie recommended to him, and that's how the attorney came to join Brown's team; this is not trivial information! Why did I have to reverse-engineer that explanation from passing comments?

And why, then, wouldn't Birman just structure the story as a sequel, with everything occurring between the first doc's release date and this one as a Part Two? Why wouldn't he put key scenes from Me Facing Life up top to bring viewers up to speed the way the directors of the Paradise Lost series did? Because I think Birman did do that, in a sense; I think he did "upcycle" whole sequences of Me Facing Life for Murder to Mercy, the better for the audience to grasp the issues at stake. I have no ethical issue with Birman or any other filmmaker doing this. It's a matter of the narrative clarity... and of the footage that's sacrificed on the later-events side. Take an awkward pre-hearing meeting sometime in the mid-aughts (after the first film), at which a mental-health counselor, Brown's adoptive mother, and Brown's biological mother meet to preview the proceedings. The scene isn't useless; it gives you context on a number of things, from Brown's acting out due to possible attachment issues to her potential inherited mental-health challenges. But wth so much ground to cover over the film's 97 minutes... and it doesn't get the time it arguably deserves.

Which brings me to the second, and largest problem with Murder to Mercy, namely that it's in the wrong "body." Cyntoia Brown's journey is compelling along a number of axes, starting with the way substance abuse is criminalized; the handling of victims of sex crimes as criminals themselves (particularly sex-trafficked teenagers); how the criminal-justice system should approach mental/neurological issues, juvenile offenders, and offenders with those issues in terms of appropriate sentencing; and the lasting effects of trauma. These are all massive topics, and Murder to Mercy can't possibly get its arms around all of them, or really even one of them, in its allotted runtime. It could do it in four episodes, though, or even six; the footage we see of Brown as a teenager, taking an evaluation and invariably describing what's happening on various "prompt" cards as adversarial or even violent, is surprising and sad. When her counselors explain Brown's "affective instability" and paranoia as coping mechanisms she's used to adapt to living in constant fear, it's fascinating, and you want to hear more — about what treatment, if any, Brown can hope for while incarcerated, and about the counselors' conclusions about her responsibility, or how they'd change the system to show more empathy to children and survivors.

Alas, there isn't time. Likewise, Brown and her team appeal based on a claim that fetal-alcohol syndrome means Brown is not entirely in control of her choices, but the documentary doesn't include an overview of the syndrome, a long-enough look at Brown's specific set of symptoms, or an analysis of how her lawyers would position it in court or why it fails. Years at a time get leaped over, maybe because nothing much changed with Brown's case but possibly also because Birman couldn't fit her studies or other aspects of her maturation into an hour and a half. Interviews with her biological mother, Georgina, and her grandmother — both survivors themselves — scratch the surface of generational legacies of mental illness and/or abuse, but don't go much deeper before the film has to move on.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Cyntoia Brown herself disavowed the new film earlier this month, stating that while she'd participated in the first film, the second was made — and sold to Netflix — without her knowledge or participation. This doesn't do much to dispel the impression that the filmmaker hasn't been entirely honest with viewers, never mind how the project may have taken advantage of its own subject. (Brown has apparently since made peace with Netflix, agreeing to help promote the film in conjunction with her own memoir.)

Taken as a whole, Murder to Mercy isn't a bad sit, but it left me frustrated. If the filmmaker had spent more time on the various facets of Brown's story, or with any one of them — or just with her and her writings — it would have felt more satisfying. As is, it's several square pegs stacked up next to a round hole.

Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story drops Wednesday April 29th on Netflix.

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Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity, and her work has appeared in Glamour and New York, and on MSNBC, NPR's Monkey See blog, MLB.com, and Yahoo!. Find her at her true-crime newsletter, Best Evidence, and on TV podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This.