With friends like Robert Durst’s “The Jinx – Part Two” was probably inevitable

One of the strangest aspects of 2015’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” is how much Robert Durst wants to be known and understood. By the time he contacted writer/director Andrew Jarecki, Durst was already a prime suspect in the 1982 disappearance of his wife Kathleen Durst and two other murders. He was also the eldest son of an extremely wealthy and influential New York real estate magnate who handed over the keys to the kingdom to his younger brother.

Jarecki’s 2010 film “All Good Things,” written by his “Jinx” co-producer Marc Smerling, was based on Durst’s 2003 trial for the murder of his neighbor Morris Black, whom he admitted dismembering . Durst might never have stood before a jury in Galveston, Texas had he not been caught trying to steal a sandwich from the grocery store while on the run. Ultimately he was acquitted. Late night comedians had a great day with that verdict and the circumstances leading up to it.

If he had never suggested that Jarecki interview him in the first place, we might never have harvested the true-crime work of “The Jinx.” Nine years after those original episodes aired, isn’t it hilarious considering Durst told Jarecki during the 2015 series premiere, “I’m not interested in doing true crime stuff.”

But flattery can get you anywhere with some people. “All Good Things” cast Ryan Gosling as a character based on Durst and Kirsten Dunst as Kathleen’s fictional doppelgänger. That convinced Durst that Jarecki understood him. Referring to the bevy of drooling producers he has dismissed in the past, he tells the filmmaker, “You know more about Robert Durst than anyone.” And how. In the sixth episode, Jarecki rights Durst to such an extent that Durst excuses himself to the bathroom and, forgetting that his microphone is still hot, mutters, “There it is.” You’re caught.”

A few moments later he mutters the words that knocked the collective wind out of the crowd: “What the hell did I do? Of course I killed them all.”

“The Jinx” then faded to black. Then the media cycle took over. Jarecki, his co-producers Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier and their team had turned over their findings to authorities, who found and arrested Durst hours before the finale’s premiere in connection with the unsolved 2000 murder of his longtime friend Susan Berman.

The ensuing national headlines provided the story’s finale in real time; the epilogue reads that Durst was tried and ultimately convicted of Berman’s murder in 2021. Durst’s acquittal ruled out his retrial for Black’s murder, and New York authorities charged Durst with Kathleen’s death in 2021, although he died in 2022 before he could be tried.

That means “The Jinx – Part Two” lacks the urgency, necessity and cultural impact of those 2015 episodes. Durst has disappeared; his name condemned.

But he was quite a character, an older man who looked like a librarian, as someone describes him, and whose lizard-like way of blinking invited amateur readings of the ever-wandering tic. In this day and age of franchise expansions, we should be surprised that HBO and Jarecki took so long to get what they could out of the pilot phase of the story.

“Part Two” begins in the aftermath of his 2015 capture, playing both a self-referential victory lap and an attempt to wrap up unfinished business. This time, Jarecki minimizes his on-camera presence in the four episodes made available for review, leaving the hero editing to LA Deputy District Attorney and cold case specialist John Lewin.

Lewin is fatherly without seeming overbearing, which is essential in a story about a creepy but bizarrely clownish killer. He is aggressive in recorded conversations with uncooperative witnesses, but otherwise he is a steady hero who throws a circus into disarray. Part of the entertainment is thanks to the two lawyers Michael and David Belcher, two players on his team. Lewin and the producers also confirm their competence, but the boyish joy they experience when they are assigned to the case and listen to the recordings of Durst’s phone conversations is infectious.

That’s mainly what these episodes offer: distraction for TV completists. Maybe that’s the entirety of what people expect from this sequel. Not many true crime titles these days fill a cultural need or, like the first six episodes, result in justice finally being meted out to offenders, although Durst’s was thoroughly delayed. But these new episodes are less about him than about investigating the people who contributed to his crimes and kept his secrets.

LA Deputy District Attorney John Lewin in “The Jinx – Part Two” (HBO)Few people can get away with nearly one murder themselves, let alone three, which is Jarecki’s direction. To paraphrase Lewin, if you have a lot of money, people are willing to do things for you, including helping you escape persecution, in the hope that some of it will go their way.

Some people did get paid, such as Durst’s considerably younger confidante Susan Giordano. She visits him in prison and giggles at his sickening flirtation. He instructs another friend to give her $150,000 to build a “love nest” where they can cuddle together after his release, which may have been news to his wife Debrah Charatan.

In 2015, “The Jinx” was something of an original, a crime docuseries that aimed to match the quality of HBO’s highbrow scripted shows. That success raised questions about journalistic integrity, especially when the unadulterated recording of Durst’s toilet confession revealed that the filmmakers had changed the order of those chilling sentences. Since then, and thanks to “The Jinx,” fewer people question a filmmaker’s right to rearrange the details to serve the dramatic power of a show.

On the other hand, that casual approach to “real” storytelling relaxes the tension and makes the places where Jarecki teases the saga’s perverse humor emerge a bit dissonant.

A certain absurdity is inherent to this season, and you simply cannot ignore it. One of the few witnesses who knows both Durst and Berman is their mutual friend Nick Chavin, who made an album in 1976 called “Country Porn” that we can assume escaped the Billboard record holders. (He treats us to a serenade from one of his colorful tunes with an dismembering a body with a bone saw “just didn’t have any impact on me.”

Part of that nonchalance may have to do with the fact that Durst got him a lucrative job in advertising. “Friendships are hard,” he says without a hint of irony.

If this seems a bit Trumpian to you, you’re not wrong; The former president’s frequent court appearances may have played a role in HBO’s decision to revisit “The Jinx.” Granted, there isn’t much in our daily lives that doesn’t explain Donald Trump’s hold on America and why his followers support him despite his criminal behavior. But it’s virtually impossible to look at these new chapters without drawing parallels, other than noting that both Trump and Durst are New York real estate growers, failons and narcissists who dangle a bounty on those who stroke their egos.

In ‘Part Two’ you see Durst urging his friends from behind bars to do his bidding and expecting nothing less than absolute loyalty. Almost all of them join because of the very real fear that he might have them killed if they didn’t.

They saw what happened to Berman, the daughter of a writer and mafia boss. However, further examination of the victim’s relationship with Durst does not exactly make her more sympathetic in the bargain. Jarecki and Smerling hinted as much in “All Good Things,” in which the character based on her was played by Lily Rabe.

However corrupt Durst’s friends and henchmen may be, the filmmakers protect some semblance of their humanity by demonstrating the dilemma of being the close ally of someone you know and trust who is credibly accused of the murder of a mutual knowledge. “What do you do when your best friend kills your other best friend?” one asks.

Robert Durst in “The Jinx – Part Two” (HBO)Durst, as you might guess, was not a willing participant this time. It doesn’t have to be that way. All his contact with others was recorded, and the episodes included many tapes of Lewin’s telephone conversations with potential witnesses. Divided into interviews, the filmmakers have more material at their disposal to conclude the story properly.

Those put off by the questionable editing and creative licenses taken in the first six episodes will find plenty of material to argue with this time around as well. My media critics want to punish Jarecki for putting entertainment value above strictly ordered journalism. But the murder mystery addict in me appreciates the simple suspense this sequel provides.

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Furthermore, Jarecki’s style of dramatic reenactments has become more common in true crime than it was a decade ago. We are in the post-Tiger King and Making a Murderer era, after all. ‘The Jinx – Part Two’ stars an elderly homicidal madman captured in New Orleans with a fake ID and passport, a loaded firearm, a map to Cuba, a stack of marijuana, tens of thousands of dollars in cash and an expensive latex mask.

Wouldn’t it be a missed opportunity, if not comically irresponsible, not to show what that could look like?

There’s enough organic strangeness in this story to make these flourishes match the content; For example, a glimpse of a healthy-looking Jeanine Pirro from when she was Durst’s nemesis is stunning in itself, albeit considerably less so than the fact that this series came into being in the first place.

Lewin himself can’t believe it. “I don’t understand it,” he tells Durst as he sits across from him in the cell in 2015 after revealing he has seen the series. “Why did you talk to them?”

“I’m still kind of processing that in my head,” Durst deadpans, in the voice of a man who realizes he’s gotten the nature of his relationship with the filmmaker who revealed who he really was wrong understood to millions of viewers who would otherwise not know it. his name.

“The Jinx – Part Two” premieres Sunday, April 21 at 10pm on HBO and streams on Max.