It’s a movie starring his nephew in the lead role, approved by his estate, and by all accounts it just feels like an attempt to whitewash him. This is a man who was accused of being a serial child molester, settled with a family out of court for $25 million just to avoid a trial (Chandler), and openly admitted he slept in the same bed as kids while he was an adult (Bashir interview), among other things. I don’t really see what there is to debate.

Anything pointing this out gets backlash on movie-related subreddits, which I find wild. It makes me wonder, if Epstein could sing and dance, would he have gotten a biopic too? Would people be defending him like this?

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    Well, he’s like a postscript to the doc. He’s only on it for like two minutes.

    He [Reed, the director] told Business Insider: “In the end I knew that Macaulay and Brett [Barnes] had made statements consistently rebutting allegations that were made. I’m not in the business of outing anyone. I think we make it very clear in the film that they deny to this day that anything sexual happened and I’m not about to try to change their minds about that.”

    The doc is about the two boys before Culkin, not the entire group of boys he collected, so dismissing 98% of the movie, and the corroborating accounts Culkin has made seems disingenuous.

    I understand people don’t want to believe it. But these two guys are direct and their stories match in many ways and they are eminently believable. If it didn’t happen to Culkin, he’d be an outlier, but - good.