Parents' Guide to Big Mack: Gangsters and Gold

In 1991, Donald Stellwag was arrested for robbing a bank. The crime was captured on cameras and the robber looked a great deal like Stellwag, both tall and "strikingly obese," in the words of one witness. As BIG MACK: GANGSTERS AND GOLD recounts, at trial, an expert witness who examined photographs declared that Stellwag's ear and the robber's were identical. That clinched the guilty verdict and a nine-year sentence. Stellwag, who is bedridden and says he has a brain tumor, from his horizontal position informs us that the story he's about to tell is "hypothetical," and that's typical of what we learn is part of his playful and possibly sociopathic personality. When the actual bank robber is caught nine years later, Stellwag spends a decade on TV talk shows riding the miscarriage of justice narrative and making money as a walking product-placement billboard for a brewery. He sues the expert witness and wins. But while this neat package of an-innocent-man-wronged holds true for the bank robbery, new accusations arise, as does a long history of wrongdoing the filmmaker fails to reveal until halfway through the film. Is Stellwag, an expert in jewelry and gold it turns out, the homebound mastermind behind a clever gold heist pulled off by a Kurdish rap star and his gangster friends? They say yes in court, but Stellwag's health rules out another prison term, so he remains free, a rascal gleeful at having bested the system. By the end, even his friends call him a liar, and everything he's said is, retrospectively, cast in a questionable light.