INDEPENDENT LENS: KNEE DEEP
PBS, 10pm et/pt
By Susan Stewart
Why did a 22-year-old Maine man named Josh Osborne shoot his mother as she was hanging laundry on a clothesline?
The documentary Knee Deep spends a fascinating 90 minutes answering that question and, in the process, paints a dark and funny picture of life on a struggling family farm.
Josh quit school after sixth grade to work on the dairy farm his parents owned, on their promise that he would eventually inherit it. When his dad died and his mother reneged, Josh consulted his friends, who helped him cook up wacky murder plots.
They planned to shoot her, to cut the brakes in her car, to hit her over the head with a shovel and bury her with the cows.
“I said to him, you can’t do that!” says Josh’s ex-girlfriend Donna. “You’ll get caught! Don’t you ever watch CSI?”
Clearly, these kids have too much time on their hands.
Donna, who faced charges for the shooting along with Josh, recalls their romance, which started when she was pregnant with another man’s child. She remembers Josh asking her, in a love note, “When are you going to calve?”
At times Knee Deep plays like a real-life version of My Name is Earl and its lens on these misbegotten kids, with their Budweiser T-shirts and bad teeth, won’t do much to heal the red-state-blue-state divide.
But the filmmakers are just keeping it real. Under the gritty surface of this film, there’s real poignancy and seriousness of purpose.
Video clips: www.pbs.org/independentlens/kneedeep
Content: Appropriate for teenagers and adults
