4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile) (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007, 113 m.). THEMES: SUPPORTIVE PEER RELATIONS; LIFE CRISIS; ILLEGAL ABORTION; DEPENDENT PERSONALITY. For roughly 24 hours, we share the tensions and uncertainty of two young women, students who are dorm roommates, as one of them, Gabita (Laura Vasilio), seeks an illicit abortion and the other, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, in an award winning turn), tries to help her. Though much has been made of a subtle political trope in this film (it is set in 1987 in the waning years of the Ceausescu regime), I found this theme too understated to be very noticeable. For me the film is primarily a study of character, of personality and adaptability, in the face of unaccustomed stress. Where Otilia is principled, dependable, resourceful and loyal, Gabita is self absorbed, deceitful, unreliable and dependent. Granted, Gabita is the one who is pregnant, but you’re struck by the sense that her helplessness cuts far deeper than her present exigency can explain. The other principals are also interesting studies: Viarel Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), the steely abortionist, and Adi Radu (Alexandru Potocean), Otilia’s nebbisher boyfriend.

The two women remind me of the pair in Erick Zonca’s 1998 film, The Dreamlife of Angels, also about an outgoing, caring young woman (played by Elodie Bouchez) and an apartment mate who is self centered, mercurial, even suicidal (Natacha Regnier). A life lesson in both stories is that you can knock yourself out for someone else without influencing them to change one whit for the better. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, of course. You do the right thing. It’s just that you have to accept the limits of your influence as well as the limits of the other person's capacities. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and awards for best film and best director at the European Film Awards. (In Romanian). Grade: B+ (02/08)

16 YEARS OF ALCOHOL (Richard Jobson, UK, 2005, 102 min.). SPOILER ALERT!  THEMES: ALCOHOLISM; ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN FAMILY OF ORIGIN; AN AA MEETING. It is indicative of the paradoxical quality of this film, Jobson’s first feature as writer-director, that the title misleads. Yes, alcohol has a prominent place in the life of the protagonist, Frankie (Kevin McKidd), but it takes a back seat to serious fighting. Frankie is the leader of a small street gang in 1970s Edinburgh and gets his kicks by bashing up bartenders and, now and then, more unruly members of his own gang. When he swears to his lover that he will change his life and attends an AA meeting with her, he introduces himself not as an alcoholic but as “a violent man.”

This is a semi-autobiographical film. Jobson was himself a member of a large street gang in Edinburgh until he was asked to join a punk band, The Skids, in the late 1970s. He’s been a musical star, poet, model, screenwriter and producer in the years since. If this film’s styles (yes, that’s a plural) tug us in differing directions, it’s because Jobson tries too hard to make Alcohol express all of his creative impulses.

On the one hand, the film poses as a raw, slice-of-life, dead end story set in a working class Scot neighborhood. With its use of McKidd and Ewen Bremner, it makes us think for a moment or two of Trainspotting, or My Name is Joe, or Sweet Sixteen. The screenplay is formulaic. Young boy becomes disillusioned watching his father’s drunken philandering and his mother’s heartbreak. He grows up furious and untrusting, cannot shake the psychological manacles of his past, and comes to a bad end.

But set against the realism of this story are art house touches that seem like they’re derived from another movie, arranged according to a different aesthetic altogether. There are visuals of lush, lyrical intimacy. The close up partial faces of new lovers smiling or gazing with adoration (we may only see their mouths or eyes). The twinkling glitter of rich amber whisky as it’s poured into a faceted glass.

Then there are Frankie’s voiceovers: philosophical axioms sonorously intoned, like lyrics sung by Leonard Cohen. Hope is the medicine of people who lead difficult, unfulfilling lives, we learn in voiceovers toward the beginning and end of the film, and the more familiar one is with hope, the less effective it becomes. Stuff like that. Some of these utterances are banal. Others are well said and poetical enough. But they seem unintegrated with the story at hand. It’s not that they don’t sound the same themes. It’s that Frankie the man, inarticulate in the extreme, would appear to be incapable of delivering such poetic homilies in his disembodied form.

Among the supporting cast, only Susan Lynch, as Frankie’s lover Mary, and Lewis Macleod, as his father, hold one’s interest. Sean O’Hagen, writing in the Guardian Observer, puts the most favorable spin on Alcohol when he calls it “…a downbeat romantic elegy for a squandered life.” Grade: B- (05/05)

THE 24 HOUR WOMAN (Nancy Savoca, US, 1999). THEME: WOMEN’S WORKPLACE ISSUES. Nonstop noisy frenetic drivel just about sums up this fractious business about the difficulties for women who desire to maintain their professional careers while also growing a family. The plot idea was fair enough: “24 Hour Woman” is the title of a daily talk show slanted toward younger women. The film opens as the show's savvy producer, Grace Santos (Rosie Perez), discovers, to her surprise, that she is pregnant. Grace and her executive producer decide to use her situation to feature pregnancy in a daily segment on the show. So far so good. But the chaotic lunacy that erupts among all the characters is way overdone and ultimately sinks the project. Grade: C (08/99)

28 DAYS  (Betty Thomas, US, 2000).  THEMES:  RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT FOR ALCOHOL PROBLEMS; BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER WITH DEPENDENT FEATURES. Sandra Bullock stars as Gwen, a thrill seeking alcoholic pill popper, who is sent to a residential chemical dependency program after a drunk driving accident. This send up of life in a substance abuse treatment program is by turns improbably corny, genuinely hilarious, and also, pardon the pun, sobering. Gwen's rapid progress is perhaps too good to be true. Still, beneath the hyperbole, the basic lessons of early recovery are all covered. With Steve Buscemi as the serious recovering program director and Azura Skye as Gwen's roommate, Andrea, a young, severely dependent borderline personality. Loudon Wainwright II provides the on ward music. See also my article titled "Good to the Last Drop." Grade: B (09/00)

101 REYKJAVIK (Baltasar Kormakur, Iceland, 2001). THEMES: LESBIAN COMEDY; GROWING UP (BETTER LATE THAN NEVER). Hlynur is an immature 30 year old living on the dole at his Mom's house. His main pursuits are booze, weed and women. His mom takes a lesbian lover (Victoria Abril) whom he impregnates while Mom's away. It's all too unsettling for Hlynur, whose choices are to destroy himself or get a life. Droll yet thoughtful comedy. (In Icelandic) Grade: B (02/01)

ABERDEEN (Hans Petter Moland, Norway/UK, 2001). THEMES: ALCOHOLISM; COCAINE DEPENDENCE; ADDICTIONS AND THE FAMILY; FATHER-DAUGHTER CONFLICT.  Study of family psychopathology. Road movie. Portrait of alcoholism and addiction. Study in human redemption and compassion. Aberdeen is all of these: a taut, spare film that combines good acting and filmcraft. Stellan Skarsgard is Tomas, the end-stage alcoholic father of Kaisa (Lena Headey) and long estranged common-law partner of Kaisa's mother, Helen (Charlotte Rampling). Helen summons the others to her bedside in Aberdeen, where she is dying of cancer. Kaisa is a London lawyer who is successful despite her major coke habit. Tomas now leads a besotted tavern dweller's existence in Oslo. (Tomas had raised Kaisa after Helen, realizing her own incompetence as a single parent, sent Kaisa off to Norway, and there are dark hints that he abused her.) We see little of Rampling, unfortunately, because this is the story of Kaisa and Tomas. The central plot consists of the struggle for Kaisa to escort her drunken father across northern Europe to Aberdeen for the reunion. It is a trip from Hell. But in the end circumstances arise which offer Tomas an opportunity to redeem himself. Love triumphs here over fear and self indulgence in a manner that is not maudlin but instead distinctly believable. Headey is terrific. Grade: B+ (01/02)

ABOUT A BOY   (Paul & Chris Weitz, UK, 2002).  THEMES: DEPRESSION & SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR IN THE MOTHER OF A 12 YEAR OLD; THE BURDEN OF A MENTALLY DISTRUBED SINGLE MOTHER ON A TEENAGE CHILD.  A quirky romantic comedy set in contemporary London, the story actually is about 2 boys who come of age: one, Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), who is 12, and the other, Will (Hugh Grant), who is 38.  Will is an empty man.  He lives off royalties from an enormously popular hit Christmas song his father wrote in 1958, and does absolutely nothing but indulge himself in superficial pleasures and relationships.  He hits upon the notion of pretending to be a single parent in order to date single moms.  This brings him into contact with Fiona (Toni Collette) and her son Marcus.  Fiona is prone to severe depression and suicidal impulses.  Marcus, feeling utterly responsible for her welfare, is a desperate, self-sacrificing young man, ridiculed at school as a mama’s boy.  He attaches himself to Will, begging him for attention and for help to save his life and Fiona’s.  Grant tries in every way to dodge these entanglements until he meets the gorgeous and entrancing Rachel (Rachel Weisz) who also has a teenage son.  Using Marcus to manipulate his way into Rachel’s affections, Will finds himself instead beginning to care more deeply about Rachel and Marcus, feelings that are new and bewildering to him.  Things get sorted out eventually as befits romantic comedy.  Collette is outstanding as the horridly depressed, lonely ex-hippie (Will once refers to her as a case of “granola suicide” in the making).  Marcus is pretty clueless for a London schoolboy, but the burden he carries to keep his mom going makes his conduct believable – a fine acting turn by young Hoult.  This is Grant’s best work ever.  His gradual transformation from (a typical Grant role) cad to caring person is bumpy, painful, and convincing.   Grade:  B+ (01/03)

ABOUT SCHMIDT  (Alexander Payne, US, 2002).  THEME: COMPLICATED BEREAVEMENT AFTER A LONG MARRIAGE.  Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson, in a stellar performance) arguably devoted more of himself to his employer, an Omaha insurance company, than to his wife and daughter combined. The story concerns Schmidt’s life over several months following retirement from his workaholic career as an insurance actuary, and then, almost immediately, the unexpected death of his wife of 42 years.  He’s lost, pathetic.  Never before capable of introspection, finally at age 66 it dawns on him for the first time how little he knew about his wife or knows about himself.  He only begins now, in a fragmented, stuttering manner, to glimpse what love is; what it means to be a father; what it is to be generous of heart; and that he is needs the affection of others.  This painful introduction to life’s basic lessons is unsought and unbidden: it befalls him; it is an unavoidable consequence of his lonely predicament.  The tension between the desperation of this nearly empty man and the hints that he may be capable of something better, more ennobling, more humane – this is the core of the story.  Kathy Bates is delicious as the aging seductive hippie mother of Schmidt’s daughter’s fiancé.  There are delightful visual details (e.g., “retirment” is misspelled on a restaurant marquee where Schmidt’s departure from employment is being celebrated).  The screenplay – by Payne and Jim Taylor – is extraordinary.  There’s nothing preachy or sentimental here.  Circumstances are often side-splittingly funny, yet Schmidt’s dilemma and reflections are serious business and they ring true.  The film has movement: there is never a sag, never a false cut.  See it. For more on this film, see my article, More Rooms in the House of Grief. Grade: A (01/03)

AFFLICTION  (Paul Schrader, US, 1998).  THEME: CHRONIC PTSD; EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA ON SUBSEQUENT PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT.  Like another recently filmed Russell Banks' story, The Sweet Hereafter, this film deals with the lasting effects of trauma on the human spirit, but the resemblance between these films ends there.  This is a sad tale of how the sins of an abusive father are visited upon his son, who tries to love but becomes lost to rage. James Coburn and Nick Nolte are excellent as the father and son.  When Wade (Nolte) says that he "feels like a whipped dog...one of these days I'm gonna bite back" he evokes a coda for the central passion of many adults who were severely mistreated as children. Equally though more subtlely portrayed is the dilemma of Rolf (Willem Dafoe), Wade's younger brother.  When Rolf tells Wade he's not afflicted, Wade's ready retort is, "that's what you think."  Later Rolf tells of his lasting affliction.  "I was a careful child and I continue to be a careful adult," he says.  Rolf avoided abuse by stealth, by not permitting himself to respond with any provocation of his alcoholic father.  But the price of his indelible, pervasive caution is that in mid-adulthood he still is single, aloof, living an orderly life as a bachelor college professor. He never returned to his hometown, not until his mother's death. Apart from this family psychodrama, the film also features a murder, or was it an accident?  Grade: B+ (2003)

AFTER INNOCENCE (Jessica Sanders, US, 2005, 95 m.). THEMES: FALSE CONVICTIONS FOR CAPITAL CRIMES; EXONERATION BASED ON DNA EVIDENCE; LIFE EXPERIENCES AFTER EXONERATION. Documentary about men who had been incarcerated, some for 20 years or more, awaiting certain execution on death row, in prisons across the country, men who subsequently have been exonerated after their convictions for capital crimes – like murder and rape – were overturned as a result of new, DNA-based evidence proving their innocence, chemical analyses that were either unavailable or not conducted at the time of their original trials. These conviction reversals are, almost without exception, the result of pro bono legal assistance and inspiration provided by the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic and criminal justice resource center established in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, at Yeshiva University, in New York City.

The two founding lawyers of the clinic, Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, have waged a relentless and tireless battle to aid wrongly convicted men facing execution, in the process encouraging the development of similar clinics and legal efforts in 30 states. To date, 175 persons have been exonerated through these efforts. Former Illinois Governor George Ryan was so impressed by the likelihood of error in capital convictions that, shortly before leaving office early in 2003, he commuted the death sentences of all convicts awaiting execution in his state.

This film focuses on eight or nine affected men, exploring the events and circumstances that followed the demonstration of their innocence. We learn some shocking things. Exoneration brings no assistance to these men. For example, even the expungement of the conviction from the criminal justice record is not automatic. It must be applied for through a convoluted paper process. In one state, the exonerated individual must pay $6,000 in fees to gain an expungement. Whereas guilty felons placed on parole may be entitled to myriad services and sources of aid for things like education, employment and heath care, exonerated persons receive no such entitlements. No state has arranged a program to offer compensation to any of these people. In nearly every instance, they don’t even get an apology from the State for erroneously taking away their freedom for years upon years.

We also are reminded of bad things we already knew from exposés on PBS’s Frontline (April 11, 2002) and other programs, namely, that prosecutors and judges are often loath to accept the DNA evidence, insisting, if you can believe this, that because a case was tried fairly, i.e., the trial met acceptable prosecutorial and judicial standards, the convict should continue to be incarcerated and even executed, despite proof of innocence! In one man’s case that we follow throughout this film, prosecutors stalled for three years after DNA testing had proven that he was not the perpetrator, during which time the man remained in prison, before Innocence Project lawyers prevailed in bringing the DNA evidence to court and winning an acquittal. Interviewed for the film, one member of that prosecuting team justified the effort to keep the convict on death row on the basis that “the victim’s family needs closure.” But not every case reveals such perversely twisted sentiments. In a heartwarming example of the opposite reaction, we see a prosecutor embrace another newly released, exonerated man, apologizing for the hardship caused by his false conviction and incarceration.

We see in this film stories of success and failure after release of these men from prison. One gets a good job from a sympathetic truck repair shop owner. Another successfully pursues his dream of becoming a psychotherapist, first obtaining an A.A. degree, then his B.S. in Psychology. But others fail to find decent work, their records still blemished by unexpunged information regarding their false convictions. One man dies of a heart attack a few years after his release. A successful support group is formed in one locale, and we learn of various efforts now underway to seek compensation, though none has so far succeeded.

Some sobering comments on the problem of false conviction are offered by Barry Scheck and others along the way. The 175 exonerated persons (it was 150 when the movie wrapped, so that is the number Scheck cites in the film interview; the website for the Innocence Project - http://www.innocenceproject.org/ - now cites 175) represent just the tip of a huge iceberg. The various Innocence Projects around the country receive hundreds and hundreds of requests for aid, far more than they can even answer, much less take on. We are shown files drawers full of unopened envelopes, letters from convicts seeking the help of Scheck and Neufeld’s clinic. Scheck says that DNA analysis is possible in only about 10% of the cases they do review. In the other 90% of cases, materials on which DNA analysis can be performed were either absent, were rendered unusable because of botched evidence collection, have been destroyed or lost in the years since the trial.

Scheck also tells us that eyewitness reports constitute the sole evidence base for successful prosecution in 78% of capital crime convictions among persons now on death row. This despite the fact that a huge body of psychological research, conducted by experts like Elizabeth Loftus at the University of Washington (now professor at the University of California, Irvine), has demonstrated the frequent unreliability of such evidence. One exonerated man’s story, followed in this film, has, since his release, brought him into contact with the rape victim who erroneously identified him in a police lineup, the sole basis of his conviction. He and the woman that he did not rape have become friends, and they share a common goal of improving the evidence base relied upon by prosecutors.

Of crucial importance in this effort is the registration of the DNA findings - findings that have proven the innocence of men like those in this film - in the existing national DNA data base, so that, like fingerprint records, DNA records might help in the future identify perpetrators of past crimes. Shockingly, this has not been done in any of the cases presented in the movie, despite repeated requests made by Innocence Project lawyers. The reluctance of the criminal justice system to acknowledge error and embrace scientific methods that can reduce false convictions is egregious.

This film is extraordinary insofar as its subject - life in the community after exoneration - has not previously been explored in any depth, factual content is lucidly presented, the men featured are articulate, highly interesting individuals (almost all, for example, are remarkably free of hostility about their experiences), the talking heads are informative and kept to an essential minimum, and the photography, editing and continuity are first rate. Jessica Sanders makes her debut here as the (co)writer-director of a feature length documentary. It’s a splendid beginning. Grade: A- (04/06)

AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 1999). THEMES: REMINISCENCE; REDEMPTION; REGRET; LIVES FULL AND EMPTY; AFTERLIFE. Literally knocking on Heaven's door, 22 recently deceased persons find themselves initially assigned to rooms in a boarding house for a week. Interviews with the staff reveal that the purpose of their stay is to select a memory of one event in their lives that they wish to live within for eternity. Once selected, all other memories will be expunged. A truly awkward aspect of this film is the work of the staff, who must then literally recreate, that is stage, the event selected by each person and then make a video of the staging. Why? One old man who has led a dull life can think of no event he would wish to return to. The staff cart in 71 videos for him to review, one made for each year of his life. How? The staff is composed of deceased people who themselves had been unable to decide on a past life event to live within, at the time they arrived in Heaven. The struggles of some of these people are hard to follow. What fascinates in this film are the reactions of the new people as each confronts the task of selecting a memory. Kore-eda also made the excellent film, Maborosi, which also concerns death, and also bereavement and survivors carrying on. (In Japanese) Grade: B- (10/99)

AGNES OF GOD (Norman Jewison, US, 1985). THEME: PSYCHIATRIST AT WORK: BAD EXAMPLE. Meg Tilly is a novice nun discovered with a strangled newborn in her quarters at the convent. And she isn’t talking about it. Jane Fonda is a court-appointed psychiatrist brought in to wheedle some information out of this possibly insane young woman and solve the case. Anne Bancroft is an appropriately arch Mother Superior who wants to control everything and knows a whole lot more than she’s letting on. Fonda’s psychiatrist shows no trace of professional skill in this highly disappointing depiction of a psychiatrist at work. Her battle of wits with each of the other two women makes for fair drama, but there is a supernatural subplot that gets in the way. Grade: C (09/98)

AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER (Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill, UK/US, 2003). THEME: ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY. This is the second film about highway prostitute Aileen (“Lee”) Wuornos made by British documentarist Broomfield, following his 1992 film, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, shot at the time of her trials in Florida for killing seven johns in a year (a film I have not seen). The new film incorporates segments of the earlier one with other interviews that fill in some details of Wuornos’s background, as well as footage of Wuornos over the 18 months before her execution in October, 2002. The material here is of heightened interest because this second documentary reached the big screen only shortly after Monster, Patty Jenkins’s dramatized version of Wuornos’s story, featuring the celebrated performance of Charlize Theron as Wuornos.

As David Denby pointed out when comparing Life and Death and Monster for The New Yorker, Monster is by far the more absorbing and revealing film, insofar as it seeks to delve below the surface of Wuornos’s notorious conduct, to construct or reconstruct a story of this unfortunate woman that succeeds in making her a more comprehensible, not to say sympathetic, character. Life and Death gives us reminiscences by several people who knew Wuornos as a youngster and her family. But these are bits and pieces. And while they are consistent with the more “interior” psychological account given in Monster, they lack the narrative cohesion of Jenkins’s screenplay. In Life and Death, Wuornos, toward the end of her 12 years of incarceration, 10 on death row, has an axe to grind and wants only to speak about one theme: who’s really to blame for her string of killings. More on that in a minute.

Life and Death might not have been made, had not Broomfield been subpoenaed to testify at an appeals hearing in which the competence of Wuornos’s original trial attorney was being challenged. Broomfield had 1992 footage that purported to show this attorney smoking copious quantities of marijuana in the hours prior to courtroom proceedings, and other footage suggesting the lawyer was attempting to pocket big money in return for granting interviews about the case. Later Wuornos told Broomfield (recorded clearly on film) that she had made up her original story of doing the killings in self defense, that in fact she had shot all the men in a calculated manner, and that her deepening Christian beliefs made it important to her to tell the truth before she died. This revelation appears to have had a transfixing effect on Broomfield.

Life and Death then narrows down to a contest of wills between Wuornos and Broomfield, each in pursuit of issues that bear on the question of responsibility for the killings. Broomfield is noted for inserting himself into the forefront of films he makes (not unlike documentarist/performance artist Michael Moore). His agenda is the self-defense issue, which he asks Wuornos about whenever he has an opportunity. Is it really true that her self-defense claim was spurious? That is what he comes back to again and again. And for good reason. Her testimony about events in the first shooting, which we see in courtroom footage, is deeply convincing (it is very much along the lines of the dramatized encounter in Monster).

For her part, Wuornos, over the year or so before her execution, has convinced herself that it was the police who were principally responsible for the killings. According to her theory, they had been watching her for months, knew almost immediately that she had killed the first man, then let her remain free to kill others, so her increasingly sensational story would pay off when police sold book and film rights. This extravagant idea has at least one strand of truth to support it: several police officers on her case did in fact attempt to sell her story for private gain, a fact that is covered in both documentaries. Wuornos eventually becomes enraged whenever Broomfield persists in bringing up the self-defense question, refusing to discuss it, breaking off their interviews. Broomfield at one point, very shortly before the execution, goes so far as to deceive Wuornos by pretending to turn off recording equipment while he persists in asking if she did or didn’t act in self-defense. She whispers that she did, but that this is not the important issue, which is the police conspiracy. She will no longer discuss the self-defense issue because it detracts from the role of the police, she implies.

This film is surely recommended viewing for anyone whose curiosity has been piqued by Monster. We can see how strikingly Theron was able to achieve a resemblance to Wuornos in looks and demeanor. On the other hand, Tyria, Wuornos’s lover, filmed in 1992, is older and more poised, not the immature ingenue depicted in Monster by Christina Ricci. A major difference is the chronology of events after Wuornos and her lover meet. It is a fact, affirmed in Life and Death, that Tyria and Lee were together for three years before the first killing occurred. In Monster, the first killing occurs just after the initial meetings of the couple, inviting the interpretation that Wuornos’s new love relationship influenced her homicidal behavior in some fundamental way. The self-defense issue in the end remains unresolved according to this film. Are we to believe the original courtroom testimony, the recanting 9 years later, or the affirmation of self defense candidly whispered when Wuornos thought she wasn’t being recorded?

Was Wuornos insane – psychotic - near the end of her life? Broomfield thinks so, and so do many viewers. The question would, of course, have had no bearing on her original conviction or sentencing, but apparently could affect the timing, at least, of her execution. An examination by a state appointed panel of three psychiatrists was hastily arranged near the end: after a 20 minute interview, they unanimously said she was sane. Of course the legal definition of sanity is simply that a person knows right from wrong, understands the charges and the terms of sentencing, that sort of thing. Clinically the issue is far more complex, less cut and dried. Even if her police conspiracy theory can be seen as a delusion, other aspects of Wuornos’ conduct and circumstances appear to belie this as part of a more pervasive psychotic disorder. Her hair trigger temper and great energy often do suggest a “mad woman” on camera, but what does this mean?

As my partner rightly puts it, Aileen Wuornos was “in a rage all her life,” and for good reason. She was the victim of terrible physical and emotional abuse, and her twisted, primitive personality developed in a manner consistent with such formative experiences: a pervasive tendency toward poorly modulated fury and a pattern of antisocial behavior. But she was not without conscience, and Life and Death very ably shows that the responsibility for the killings clearly weighed in upon her during her years on death row. She describes being alone, isolated, most of the time in prison. Many of the staff on death row, she claims, did not like her. These are conditions conducive to the development of idiosyncrasies in thinking. It isn’t hard to see how she might seize upon a police conspiracy theory as a means of assuaging her own guilt and channeling some of her anger. Having become enamored of this idea, she then demonstrates a keen rationality in wishing to dismiss further talk about self-defense, for that theme keeps the focus on her responsibility, not the culpability of the police. And, through it all, she demonstrates a highly realistic view of the virtual certainty that she will be executed. Wrathful, yes. Eccentric, to be sure. But Aileen Wuornos doesn’t seem crazy to me. Grade: B (04/04)

ALICE AND MARTIN (André Techiné, France, 2000). THEME: DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER WITH COMA AND TRANSIENT MEMORY LOSS.. Story of star-crossed lovers. Martin (Alexis Loret), an illegitimate child, moves to his father's house at age 10 but feels imprisoned there by the man's callousness. Ten years later Martin flees after pushing his father down stairs to his death. (The mother, the only witness, covers up the true events, saying it was an accidental fall.) Martin moves to Paris, where he meets Alice (Juliette Binoche), a more experienced woman eking out a living as a violinist, who shares an apartment with Martin's gay halfbrother. Martin and Alice become lovers, but when she becomes pregnant and reveals the fact to Martin, this news activates his suppressed guilt about killing his father, precipitating an dissociative disorder marked by sudden weakness, loss of consciousness and transient coma-like state, with weakness for awhile after regaining consciousness in a few hours and loss of memory for immediate events around the onset of unconsciousness.

Irritable, socially aloof, but physically stronger after a few weeks, he tells Alice the true story of his father's fate but this brings no relief. He insists that only by being tried for the killing can he find peace. He moves on to a psychiatric hospital and Alice does his bidding, going to his stepmother to persuade her to be a witness to the facts the day Martin pushed his father down the stairs. He turns himself in, and the film ends with him awaiting a sentence but now unburdened by guilt, feeling positive about the relationship to Alice and the as yet unborn baby. Alice of course is left pregnant, and without her man or much of a living. Binoche is convincing, given the premise that we know almost nothing about her background except that she apparently has never previously had a sustained love relationship. Perhaps this explains her poor choice in picking Martin. Loret is even more convincing, and about him and his background we learn a lot. The screenplay is long and heavy going but does have integrity. (In French) Grade: B (05/01)

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 1999). THEMES: WOMEN’S ISSUES; TRANSGENDER ISSUES. Considered perhaps Almodovar's most serious work to date, this is, he says, a tribute to women, to actresses who play actresses, to men who would be women, to all who wish to be mothers, and so on. He brings together several great female players. The story centers on Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a former prostitute whose son dies early in the film, leading her from Madrid back to Barcelona where she encounters an old friend and transsexual prostitute Agrada (Antonia San Juan) and a great actress, Huma Roja (Marisa Paredes), among other women. Manuela's grief moves her to help first her old friend, then a young pregnant woman, Rosa (Penelope Cruz), then Roja. Everything as usual is highly colorful and full of wonderful gender-bending personalities in Almodovar's world. (In Spanish) Grade: B (01/00)

ALL THE REAL GIRLS  (David Gordon Green, US, 2003).  THEME: ACHIEVING MATURE RELATIONSHIPS (YOUNG ADULT COMING-OF-AGE). It's a pleasure to see an American film about coming-of-age and romance that much of the time feels fresh and real.  The title is misleading and may turn aside an important audience for this film.  As I see it,  Real is as much a guyflick as a romantic comedy; in fact it has the best guy scenes and conversations I can recall in a U.S. film since Spring Forward. We meet a group of four or five young men in their early 20s who have always known each other.  They live in a run down river town in North Carolina that had been prosperous before all the textile mills closed but one.  These guys aren't going anywhere and have reached an age where they're just starting to worry about that, to feel vulnerable.  Then Noel (Zooey Deschanel), the 18 year old kid sister of one of the guys, comes home to roost after 6 years away at boarding school.  She proceeds to put some moves on her brother Tip's best buddy, Paul (Paul Schneider, who also co-wrote the screenplay).  Paul has laid every woman in town he could get his paws on since he was 13.  His own mother (Patricia Clarkson in one of her less memorable roles) at one point tells Paul that "...you're not careful, educated, honest or strong, and you don't have any faith." 

But Noel spins Paul around, he becomes genuinely disoriented, and for the first time he feels something akin to honesty and inklings of love for this girl.  The emergence of their connection feels valid.  Meanwhile Tip (Shea Whigham), a rougher sort of rascal who knows Paul like the back of his own hand, is not at all happy that his kid sister is probably being shagged by the most notorious heartbreaker in town.  But Tip's own jets get cooled when his girlfriend turns up pregnant, and, to his own great surprise, the thought of becoming a father actually opens Tip's heart more than a little.  Noel also has some growing up to do, in the course of which she pulls some stunts that appear to torpedo her affair with Paul.  A. O. Scott rightly calls Paul and Noel's  "...a sweet, fumbling, inconclusive romance."  

This film for the most part manages to steer clear of cliches, sitcom dialogue and the trite plot formulas.  The lines often surprise and delight.  The film is somewhat uneven.  It moves briskly along for the first hour, inventive and feeling as real as life itself.  The filmmakers seem to stray from their well conceived design for the following half hour, as they focus away from the guys and first glow of romance toward the problematic phase of Paul and Noel's relationship.  The dialogue now becomes more prosaic, less inventive; time-lapse photography is employed at one point for no apparent reason, as if some Gus Van Sant footage had mistakenly turned up here; and a few scenes seem too cute and contrived (examples: Paul and Noel standing halfway down a lane in an empty bowling alley; Paul and a buddy driving his barely functioning old compact car in a hardtop auto race).   But toward the end the ship is righted, picks up steam, and sails proudly into port with a rapid sequence of brief, humorous scenes reprising the main characters. Grades: drama: B, process of maturation in love relationships: A- (02/03)

ALL WINTER WITHOUT FIRE (Tout un hiver sans feu) (Greg Zglinski, Switzerland/others, 2004, 90 m.) THEMES: GRIEF, LOSS, REFUGEE DISLOCATION & ADAPTATION. Sensitively etched study of loss and dislocation in contemporary western Europe. The French actor Aurélien Recoing (Time Out) plays Jean, who comes from a long line of farmers. We meet him sometime after his life has been devastated after a fire in his barn in which his young daughter was trapped and died. As is so often the case in real life, this terrible loss has also torn his marriage apart, leaving Jean to suffer the dual loss of his wife and his child. Not only that, he cannot get a loan to rebuild the barn and replace his livestock, threatening to end his life work - and family tradition - as a farmer.

Through an old friend, Jean gains a job at a steel foundry in the city. It’s alien work to him, but he stoically adapts. He falls in with a group of displaced Albanian Kosavars who also work there, and is welcomed into their social circle. Vaguely romantic exchanges with a Kosavar woman (whose husband has gone missing for several years and, we can presume, is dead, even if she doesn’t recognize this) and the broader fellowship of the men he hangs out with, begin to rekindle Jean’s demoralized spirits. Meanwhile, Jean’s depressed wife Laure has been more-or-less appropriated by her sister Valerie, whose notion of being supportive consists of devaluing Jean while nuzzling up to her bereft sister in a manner suggestive of consummate possession, if not outright sexual desire.

AMERICAN BEAUTY (Sam Mendes, US, 1999). THEMES: FAMILY CONFLICT; DEPRESSION; MID-LIFE CRISIS. SPOILER ALERT! Oh. Oh. Out in the suburbs there's trouble brewing once again in the contemporary American nuclear family. Maybe we should give films on this subject their own genre label. Similar to the "Western," we could call them "Suburbans" or, better, “Exurbans,” so as not to confuse them with GM’s huge SUVs. Possibly this genre was born in 1980, with Redford's "Ordinary People." Lately in this mold we've already had The Ice Storm, Happiness, The Truman Show and Steven Soderbergh’s unhinged take, Schizopolis.

Career doldrums. Self absorbtion. Boredom. Sex life in free fall. Adolescent children depressed, spoiled, estranged, sick of their parents' pretensions. Everyone's angry and their nerves are frayed. Then somebody gets hurt. Or gets free. Or both. And there you have it: the formula for a "Exurban."

That's what we have here, in American Beauty, but this film is better than the others I’ve mentioned. For one thing, there is a hyperreal quality to the film – meaning that elements in it are intentionally exaggerated, for dramatic, not comedic, effect. In part this effect is created visually. David Denby, in The New Yorker magazine, has written about the look of this film: "...the compositions are gleaming and hard-edged...but everything is a little too bright, too clear..."

Besides that, these people do things that are over the top and unexpected. One is thus set up to constantly wonder what on earth they might do next. It could be anything. And, as in the films of David Lynch or John Dahl, a tension is thus created in the viewer that persists even when the characters take no further unusual action at all. Besides providing suspense, and despite the desperate angst that drives the main protagonist, this film, unlike Ice Storm, also sounds a hopeful note, suggesting that beauty surrounds us, and that it is possible to change our stance in the world, if we will only imagine more clearly how lovely life could be. Cynics will say, "Stop and smell the coffee. Yeah. Right. So then, how come the guy has to die?” Still, in a film genre prone to exploiting negatives, I find the positive riffs in this film refreshing.

The big thing that sets this film apart from other recent Exurbans is the quality of the performances. In nearly every role the players convey a richness, complexity and tautness of character that is compelling and believable. Kevin Spacey has been rightly praised for his work in the central role as the husband, but very good turns are also contributed by Annette Bening (the wife), Thora Birch (the daughter), Mena Suvari (her best girlfriend), Wes Bentley (the daughter's boyfriend), Chris Cooper (his father) and Peter Gallagher (the wife's lover). Sam Mendes, an experienced British stage director, evokes these fine performances and scores a hit in his film directing debut here. Oscar winners here included Spacey (Best Actor), Mendes (Best Director) and the movie (Best Film). Grade: A- (10/99)

AMERICAN HISTORY X (Tony Kaye, US, 1998). THEMES: HATE CRIMES; VIOLENCE; MORALITY; CAPACITY FOR CHANGE. Edward Norton gives a dazzling performance as Derek, a young skinhead who murders 2 blacks and while in prison discovers a different point of view about racial and other moral matters. But his reforms come too late to save his family from further tragedy related to his earlier misdeeds. With many fine supporting roles, especially Edward Furlong as Derek’s kid brother Danny, Beverly d'Angelo as their mother, Doris, and Avery Brooks as a teacher, Bob Sweeney. Grade: B+ (04/99)

AMERICAN MOVIE (Chris Smith, US, 2000). THEME: OUTSIZE, DRIVEN CHARACTER. Hilarious documentary of a film being made by the outrageous Mark Borchardt of Milwaukee. Borchardt, 29, has been making short horror films since age 14 with the volunteer help of his family and friends. Now, rejecting the notion of spending his life working at a regular job for somebody else but desperately aware that he needs to make good soon if he wants to realize his dream of a career as a filmmaker, Borchardt begins "Northwestern," about people he knows whose lives revolve around drinking and independence from the fetters of the mainstream culture. Actually, we never learn much about "Northwestern," a project Mark must temporarily abandon until he raises some cash. This he attempts to do by finishing an earlier project, "Coven," which he thinks will take 2 weeks but in fact takes over 2 years. We get to know his friends (in particular, Mike Schank, a burnt out drugger who is also a fine musician [he does the music for this film] and natural deadpan comedian), his parents, and his Uncle Bill (who is named executive producer of "Coven" having finally given Mark $3K after endless shakedowns by Mark), among others. Borchardt is bright, quirky, loyal to his friends, a nonstop talker, but most of all, he is indefatigable in his pursuit of his dreams, and it is his tireless spirit which provides the underpinning for this film, on top of which the funny situations keep on popping up at every turn. Grade: B+ (01/00)

AMERICAN SPLENDOR  (Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman, US, 2003).  THEME: DEPRESSIVE PERSONALITY.  In the 1960s we spoke of  "depressive personalities" - people for whom a depressive orientation seemed woven into the very fabric of their character, rather than being a superimposed disease.  For such folks, everyday frustrations assume epic proportions, because of a lack of stamina, limited coping skills, and a corresponding tendency to magnify all problems out of proportion.  Self-defeating behavior results from pessimism and irritability, creating self fulfilling prophesies in a vicious cycle of misery. 

Harvey Pekar appears to be a serious and illustrative case.  Pekar is an underground comic book writer, and this film is a biopic about his life, or better, about his way of life.  Pekar is about the glummest, most pessimistic, least socially attractive underdog that you’re likely to run into.  He lives a barren existence, abandoned by two wives.  He finds fleeting satisfaction when he discovers rare old jazz recordings at garage sales and can bargain the price down below a quarter.  His major challenge is somehow persevering through dreary weekends of painful loneliness. 

Pekar has a chance encounter with underground comic artist Robert Crumb in the 1970’s, shows Crumb some notes about his daily struggles to cope with life, and the two agree to create a new series of graphic novels entitled “American Splendor” – written by Pekar and illustrated by Crumb and several other alternative comic artists.  The series catches on and paces a surge of new graphic novel comics in the 1980s, attracts Joyce Brabner, who becomes Pekar’s enduring domestic partner, and lands Pekar as a regular guest on the David Letterman show.  But none of this adds much gold to the Pekar coffers or alters Pekar’s certainty that life will remain difficult.  He sticks to his day job filing records at a VA hospital. 
 
This film is a bold docudrama in which fictional representations of the central characters are often interposed with or depicted alongside the real people.  Paul Giamatti (Pekar), Hope Davis (Joyce) and Judah Friedlander (Pekar’s semi-autistic coworker, the porcine Toby Radloff) are astonishingly like the real life people they portray.  We know this because we also meet these real people, and in some scenes see the real and fictional characters side by side.  Thus the writer-directors vividly realize on film what the “American Splendor” comic series achieved in print: the transparent and accurate stories of real people. Fellow employees at the hospital were always eager to see if they made it into the next issue.  

The film opens with a row of five boys trick-or-treating.  The first four are in superhero costumes.  Then there’s a young Harvey in his ordinary garb, just sullenly being himself.  That is the heart of  “American Splendor” comics and Pekar – a nerdy nobody as superhero, without trappings or any special powers, braving the tribulations of daily life, pushed to his limits in exaggerated mortal combat against the great dark forces of the world, like the old woman ahead of him who takes forever in the supermarket line.  The filmmakers have captured these everyday trials and heroics perfectly.  And they have done so while at the same time preserving the integrity of the graphic comic novel format.  The opening credits, for example, are all ingeniously rendered as a series of comic picture/text boxes. Very nice work!  (The film was the 2003 Sundance grand jury prize winner.)  Grade: A- (08/03)

ANALYZE THIS  (Harold Ramis, US, 1999).  THEME: COMEDY ABOUT TRANSFERENCE/ COUNTERTRANSFERENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY A Mafia kingpin (Robert DeNiro) develops acute symptoms of anxiety and depression, and makes offers that a psychiatrist (Billy Crystal) cannot refuse, to arrange treatment.  Ethical and boundary breaches abound, but it is all in the service of over-the-top farce, so who can complain?  With brief performances by a simpy Lisa Kudrow and a fiery Chazz Palmintieri.  For more on this film, see my article, Beyond Outrage.  Grade: B (06/99)

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (Jane Campion, New Zealand, 1991). THEME: PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALIZATION. First rate dramatization of New Zealand writer Janet Frame's three-part autobiography. Part one traces her childhood and adolescence. It has a remarkable integrity; it may well be one of the most knowing and sensitive portrayals of children's experiences ever recorded on film. Part two covers the terrible years when Ms. Frame was endured lengthy public hospitalizations for mental illness, receiving countless ECT treatments, until the publication of her short stories and first novel, and a prize for the latter, altered the manner in which she was regarded by psychiatrists and led to her emancipation from the hospital, barely avoiding a leukotomy. This segment is also cohesive. Part three is less successful, tracing Frame's experiences abroad in Britain and Spain in her late 20s, and her eventual return to New Zealand after her father's death. Campion made a superb film, aided by a generally superior screenplay by Laura Jones, good photography by Stuart Dryburgh, help from Frame, fine acting from Kerry Fox, and great casting of the two youths who played Janet as a child and an adolescent. Grade: A- (01/02)

ANGELS IN AMERICA: I Millenium Approaches; II Perestroika (Mike Nichols, US, 2003). THEMES: IMPACT OF AIDS; DEATH & DYING. A cartoon in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine shows a man chatting with the minister after a Sunday church service. “Oh, I know He works in mysterious ways,” the man says, “but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.” The tone was more severe in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner’s epic play, adapted by Mr. Kushner and directed by Mike Nichols for the small screen on HBO last year, and now available on 2 DVDs. When Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a gay man dying of AIDS in the mid 1980s, is given an opportunity to address a panel of Angels at the gates of Heaven, he discovers that a reactionary God became bored with man’s restless quest for progress and change, and vanished in disgust early in the last century, on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, to be precise. Outraged by what he perceives as an act of such gross irresponsibility, Prior rails at the Angels, “If God shows up again, sue the Bastard for walking out!” Offered the choice between staying on in a comfortable if Godless Heaven and returning to a life dominated by suffering and uncertainty, Prior doesn’t hesitate: he chooses life over death because, as he says in a longish speech, where there’s life there’s hope.

That’s really what this six hour miniseries comes down to: yes the world’s a terrible, treacherous place; yes there is little evidence of peace or justice, or of the love that they engender; yes, our efforts to move forward may merely amount to what Prior terms “a kind of painful progress.” But it is life here on earth that counts and to this we must commit ourselves. No institution in our society goes unskewered here. Our world is branded as “terminal, crazy and mean.” After a meandering cavalcade through the deeply troubled human arenas of faith, religion, politics, love, hatred, sexuality, marriage, prejudice, poverty, privilege and illness in the midst of the Reagan years, we emerge confronting a spirituality that is both minimalist and earth-bound, not elaborate or Heaven-inspired. When the Angel of America (Emma Thompson, who received no awards for her turn here, although I think she deserved something just for being a good enough sport to take on such a ridiculous role) visits Prior, she embraces him in literally electrifying sexual union, making use of all 8 of her vaginas. Magical realism may lace this production lavishly, but make no mistake, we're talking a seriously corporeal spirituality here, nothing ethereal about it.

You probably know the history by now. In 1987, a group in San Francisco, the Eureka Theater, commissioned Kushner’s play about AIDS in the gay community. Part 1 (Millenium Approaches) debuted in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1991, then in London, before a Broadway debut in 1992 that won a Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize for Kushner. Part 2 (Perestroika) followed on Broadway in 1993. Literary critic Harold Bloom listed this play as one of the most important literary works of the 20 th century. The timing of the stage productions was fortuitous – around the fall of the USSR and Berlin Wall, and before the upturn in the U.S. economy and better drug strategies for AIDs. The timing of the HBO production is even more poignant: with AIDS now spreading across the world, and the excesses and hypocrisies of the present Bush Administration making the Reagan era seem in some respects like the good old days. Not to mention the apocalyptic miasma that has enshrouded us since 9/11: near the end of the final hour, we see a silhouette of the lower Manhattan skyline (it’s 1990), and there are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, rising ghostlike in fuzzy gray tones.

This miniseries, shot in New York City, except for the Heavenly scenes shot in Tivoli, Italy, teems with characters, subtexts and scenes, but it’s all pretty easy to follow. Prior’s gay partner of 4½ years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), a neurotic headtripper of Allenesque proportion, cannot face Prior’s illness and abandons him. Meanwhile, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a devout Mormon Republican lawyer, is involved in a disintegrating marriage to dependent, Valium-addicted Harper (Mary-Louise Parker). Joe is struggling to suppress his own longstanding homosexual yearnings. Joe is also a protégé of the notorious attorney Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), yes, the same malevolent shark who served as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel and as a prosecutor at the Rosenberg espionage trial in the 1950s. He’s a nasty man who is proud of his base and unethical machinations. He hates Communists, liberals, racial minorities and gays, though he is a barely closeted homosexual himself and, as it turns out, is also dying of AIDS in 1985 (Cohn did indeed die of AIDS in 1986, claiming to the end that he had liver cancer, just as portrayed here). Joe abandons Harper, and has a brief affair with Louis, whom he has met at work).

Prior has visitations from ancestral ghosts (he’s from a family that has been important forever) and Angels. Wildly improbable as they may be, these visions ably serve several dramatic purposes. They provide grand spectacle, something that delights post-modern theater audiences, and that in fact is put in even finer form on the screen, thanks to CG technology and splendid production design by the veteran Stuart Wurtzel. These dazzling visitations also are as energizing for viewers as they are for Prior: they keep one awake and aroused amidst the pathos of life in these United States. Whether they also properly imbue the proceedings with the sense of millennial high stakes that Kushner wants is more open to argument.

There is a great deal of unevenness in this series. Some characters are better than others. Pacino and Kirk are fine. Mr. Shenkman is rather one-dimensional, too much the immature urban Jewish stereotype, and the fiercely Angelic Ms. Thompson (who also plays an AIDS nurse and a homeless person of indeterminate gender in a vacant lot in the Bronx) is, well, awefully feathery. Heterosexual marriage, represented by "the Pitts," takes quite a beating in the film; I cannot be sure if this is Kushner’s intention, or if it is at least partially the unintended consequence of faulty acting by Ms. Parker and, especially, the wooden Mr. Wilson. The dialogue is highly variable, almost as if written by a committee. There is a fair measure of humor to be found, though not a lot. Amidst the jargon of 1980s New York City, there are scenes that have the ring of Shakespeare, others of Thornton Wilder, still others of a more canny 18 th century wit, like the early Cocteau-inspired fantasy scene in which Harper and Prior discuss the limits of imagination. The introductory musical theme, featuring oboe, sounds very much like the music from the HBO Series, Six Feet Under. Small surprise, then, to find it was written by the same fellow, the prolific Thomas Newman.

I haven’t yet mentioned the two best characters in the series: Meryl Streep (who plays a Rabbi; an Angel; the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who visits Roy Cohn's deathbed; and Joe Pitt’s matter-of-fact , unflappable mother, Hannah – her lead role), and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his Tony Award-winning stage roles in AIA: Perestroika (he plays the former drag queen Belize, an AIDS nurse, as well as lesser roles as Harper Pitt’s fantasy tour guide, Mr. Lies, and, briefly, an Angel). Hannah Pitt drops her widow's life in Salt Lake City and rushes to Brooklyn to attempt to rescue Joe and his marriage, both beyond repair, as it turns out. But she finds plenty to do taking care of Prior and others, and adds a bit of drollery as well. Belize, full of wisdom, wit and swish for every occasion, is even helpful to Roy Cohn, who offers only insults in return. Prior Walter may be a valiant fighter struggling against all odds to cling to life, but it is Hannah and Belize who are the tough, unsentimental, resourceful sorts that respond best to those around them in need. If humanity does move forward, as Prior hopes, these are the stalwarts we will need. Grade: A- (10/04)

ANGELS OF THE UNIVERSE (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, Iceland, 2001). THEMES: SCHIZOPHRENIA; SUICIDE; PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL; COMMUNITY CARE. SPOILER ALERT! This film opens with a riveting scene of four wild horses galloping through the ocean surf, and we learn through the voiceover by the film's protagonist, Paul, that his mother dreamt this scene while pregnant with him. Paul is now in his 20s. He and his working class parents live in multiunit housing. He doesn't work much, but creates weird surreal paintings, plays rock drums with his buddy Ragnwald, and fancies himself a poet. "I'm not human..." he says early on to his upper middle class girlfriend, Dagny, "...I'm the patch of blue sky in the fairy tale." His happiness is shattered when, under pressure from her parents, Dagny jilts Paul. This seems to trigger, as such events often will, Paul's descent into a schizophrenic illness from which he will not recover. This descent is stepwise, gradual, relentless and – from a clinical perspective - precisely, impeccably authentic (with a few exceptions to be discussed later).

First Paul withdraws socially, becomes increasingly irritable, and develops headaches. He lies in bed all day, without energy or purpose. This picture may seem like depression but it can be a typical pre-psychotic prodrome heralding an eventual acute schizophrenic episode, which is the case for Paul. He grows more tense and emotionally labile, unpredictably explosive or sad. He makes sexual overtures to a married neighbor woman. He begins to show signs of paranoia, expressing self-referential thinking (personalizing events or comments unrelated to oneself) and displaying predicate logic, a typical aspect of schizophrenic thinking disorder (his parents criticize the color of a house they pass on a Sunday drive, and, because his jacket is of a similar hue, he accuses them of criticizing him). He gets more paranoid, thinks he's being followed, and develops delusions of grandeur (Jesus tells him to create a new ark, for he is the last man on earth). He begins to alter his body, shaving his head, running for long jaunts. His rages increase. Then he is hospitalized.

Conditions on the ward are also strikingly realistic. It’s clean and tidy but bleak. We meet Oli, who plays guitar and sings (badly) and claims that he sends his compositions telepathically to the Beatles, never mind that it is years since they disbanded. We also meet Peter, who has a young child and who postures oddly in the manner of some chronic patients, and Victor, an intelligent, educated fellow who has strong, to some extent delusional, neo-Nazi leanings. Everyone sits around passively killing time by smoking one cigarette after another (smoking rates among schizophrenics top 90%; nicotine may actually normalize some aspects of brain neurotransmission). The ward doctor is kindly but questionably effective.

Paul is discharged after a long while (his hair fully grown out again). He returns to his parents' house. He moves slowly and doesn't say much (is this the result of drug effects? Post-psychotic depression? Schizophrenic apathy? Maybe some of each?) He stops his medications. The rages return. He runs off in the wintry night barefoot and is brought back to the hospital. The staff have to take him down after he starts hitting an attendant who has tried to take away Paul’s radio. Medications cause acute dystonia - he can't speak properly. He tells the doctor later that "NATO made me crazy - I was born on the same day Iceland joined NATO, you know." More sitting around bored in the dayroom with Oli, Peter and Victor, who are all back or perhaps never left. More cigarettes. Victor now has a pill rolling tremor, a side effect of antipsychotic medication. Then Peter suicides. Then Paul's successful old friend Ragnwald, who had become a dentist, also suicides, out of the blue. Once again "stabilized," Paul is discharged, this time to a "rehab home" - a high rise where he has a tiny room on the top floor (he ruefully observes that this is perhaps to be his greatest achievement - reaching the top floor of a rehab home). Life is bleak. He is robbed of his welfare money. Nothing changes. He says that there is a "...merciless onslaught to reality at the bottom of my dreams."

Good as it is, this depiction of mental illness isn't perfect. Fridriksson lapses into conventional hokey cinema imagery at least twice: he has Paul walk on water when he walks into the bay, while the policemen following him are waist deep; and he has Paul experience a vivid vision of his girlfriend as a luminous nude - more a hallucination befitting someone in a toxic delirium or an hysteric, not someone with schizophrenia. And he misses one cardinal symptom of the disorder - auditory hallucinations. Nevertheless, this is perhaps the most authentic, unvarnished portrayal of the descent of a young adult into schizophrenic illness yet filmed in a dramatic fictional form. The bleakness of Paul's circumstances is common, and his particular fate, suicide, occurs often in persons with this problem, especially in the early years of the disease.

I believe that, if accurately portrayed, the signs of a mental illness (the actor’s embodiment of these signs in his or her conduct) and facts about the disorder and its treatment can be arranged by a skilled screenwriter to be profoundly dramatic without any misrepresentation or fanciful embellishment. I don't mean by this that there is no place in cinema for fantastic behavior, dreams or reveries. Of course these should be available to any storyteller. But in creating the fantastic - experiences that have no place as parts of mental illness - the filmmaker should be careful not to suggest that he or she is depicting a bona fide mental illness. Anyone can have a fantastic experience. But only the mentally ill can have certain persistent patterns of thinking, perceiving and behaving that mark their disorder. Paul's story is a case in point. I think, on the whole, that it is presented very realistically and arranged in a manner so as to be dramatically compelling.

A different question is whether the story of someone undergoing the process of a mental illness is, no matter how well told, in and of itself sufficient to make a successful feature length dramatic motion picture. For a more objective view on this issue, I canvassed several non-mental health professional film friends who saw the same screening of Angels. They were divided on this, the majority being only mildly impressed with the film (my partner and one or two others, on the other hand, found it spellbinding). It may be necessary to combine the mental illness aspect of a protagonist's story with something more to reach the threshold for effective drama. This, I think, was achieved splendidly in another film I saw a few days earlier, A Place Nearby, that focuses on a parent's anguish in caring for a mentally disturbed adult offspring and adds in a murder mystery subtext to boot. (In Icelandic) Grade: B- (02/01)

ANNA LUISE AND ANTON (Pünktchen und Anton) (Caroline Link, Germany, 1999). THEME: CHILDHOOD: COPING WITH ADVERSITY. Link made the excellent film, Beyond Silence, an Oscar nominee for best foreign film in 1998, about a girl with normal hearing who is torn between her role as the connection for her deaf parents to the larger world and her ambition to become a professional musician. Here Link has created a charming film about family life and the devotion of children to one another and to those they love. The German title is better, for this is the story of "Little Punk," the nickname everyone calls Luise, an endearing, enterprising but sad 10 year old girl whose wealthy parents are too busy for her, and her best friend, Anton, son of an ailing, poor, but lovingly devoted single mom. The film is full of fun, for instance, Anton's mom's hula hoop dance, Bertha the cook's burglar trapping, and the conga line dance done by P ü nktchen, Bertha and Laurence, the young French aupair. Great film for kids (except for the subtitles, unfortunately) because it emphasizes the importance of loyalty, devotion, loving relationships, fairness and honesty. (In German) Grade: B (02/00)

ANNIVERSARY PARTY (Jennifer Jason Leigh & Alan Cumming, US, 2001). THEMES: RELATIONSHIPS; FRIENDSHIPS; DRUGS: ECSTACY; NO CIGARETTE SMOKING IN FILM. Good friends Leigh and Cumming decided to make a film in which they and their Hollywood acting buddies could participate. It would be a party with all the action taking place on a single evening. They made up a rough storyline over many months and then had the cast improvise a lot of the details as they filmed. In the story they are a married couple who had separated for 5 months because of their differences and who have now come back together to celebrate their 6th anniversary, inviting all their friends to help them celebrate their reunion.

Joe (Cumming) is a British novelist with a bisexual past who is about to direct his first film (of one of his novels). Besides male and female (Jennifer Beals) former lovers, he invites Skye (Gwyneth Paltrow) a young rising star who will have the lead role in Joe's film, a role based on Sally (Leigh), when she was younger. Sally is an actress who is now a bit over the hill, and the awarding of a role representing her to a younger actress is both threatening and infuriating to her. She also is not doing well in her latest acting job. Sally also has invited someone not on the "A" list of old friends: the next door neighbor couple from Hell (Denis O'Hare and Mina Badie) with whom she and Joe have been at war over Joe's dog's barking. Lawsuits have been threatened. Then there is Sally's current film director (John C. Reilly) and his neurotic new mom wife (Jane Adams), Sally's male film costar (Kevin Kline) and his real-life wife (Phoebe Cates), an old friend of Sally's. The couple's accountant (John Benjamin Hickey) and his wife (Parker Posey) help round out the action, along with Peter Sellars look-alike Michael Panes and a covey of bit players. It's quite a gang.

What threatens the film but is also its greatest strength is the mundane nature of the party. It's like any large party. This could be you and your friends. It's full of discontinuities...bits and pieces of conversation... banalities, humor, embarrassments...and it goes on and on, fueled through the night by everyone's dropping "Ecstasy." What's humdrum is that we learn nothing new from witnessing this group. What's nice is that the emotionally charged confrontations - and there are a few, once the Ecstasy takes hold - are balanced by some very heartfelt, simple, caring gestures among friends here. People are for the most part unpretentious, not gushy or showy or false. Also, notice that no one's smoking, except for an occasional joint, and after several rounds of champagne, everyone switches to bottles of Evian. It's a well done two hour slice of Hollywood celeb life, turn of century style...a contemporary seriocomic drama of manners, Hollywood style. Grade: B+ (07/01)

ANOTHER COUNTRY (Marek Kanievska, UK, 1984). THEME: GAY TEEN ISSUES. A young Rupert Everett is superb as a public school student in 1930s Britain in a role based loosely on the experience of Guy Burgess, who later spied for and defected to the USSR. Adapted by Julian Mitchell from his play of the same name. The subject of homosexuality in public boarding schools of that era is treated with frankness and empathy. This film appeared just a year after John Schlesinger's An Englishman Abroad with Alan Bates as Guy Burgess, a short film account of a true encounter in Moscow between Burgess and the touring actress Coral Browne. Grade: B (07/00)

ANTWONE FISHER (Denzel Washington, US, 2002). THEMES: ADULT CONDUCT DISORDER RELATED TO CHILDHOOD ABANDONMENT, MISTREATMENT; PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK.  Washington’s directing debut, this is the story of a disadvantaged but talented young African American man (well played by Derek Luke) who matures with the help of a psychiatrist (Washington) while serving in the Navy.  The autobiographical screenplay was wrtten by Fisher, who was discovered working as a security guard at Sony Pictures.  The film tells an emotionally moving story in a reasonable and interesting manner.  Near the end, however, things unfortunately do spin out of control a bit, when a houseful of relatives and complete table of well prepared food dishes materialize on an hour’s notice to welcome Fisher, and, in the final scene, when the psychiatrist shares his personal issues with Fisher and thanks Fisher for helping him come to terms with his marital dilemma.  Too pat, too sticky.  Washington’s psychiatrist is a brooding yet kindly fellow, but he often crisscrosses the boundary between being a professional caregiver and a paternalistic friend.  The best scenes concern the budding love relationship between Fisher and his girlfriend, Cheryl, played by Joy Bryant, who has an arresting screen charisma. Grade: B- (08/03)

THE APOSTLE (Robert Duvall, US, 1997). THEME: OUTSIZED, UNUSUAL PERSONALITY. Duvall successfully wrote and directed this showcase for his own considerable talent. This is the story of the adventures of a charismatic, passionate, forceful whirlwind of a southern fundamentalist tent preacher, a violent man driven by his love of Christ and women, among other appetites. With Farrah Fawcett, Billy Bob Thornton, June Carter Cash and Miranda Richardson. Grade: B+ (02/98)

THE ART OF NEGATIVE THINKING (Kunsten å tenke negativt) (Bård Breien, Norway, 2006, 79 m.). THEMES: GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY; MARATHONS; GROUPS FOR PHYSICALLY DISABLED & THEIR PARTNERS. A marathon group therapy session for physically handicapped patients and their partners serves as a tidy vehicle for exploring the passions that can bubble forth when people with major disabilities own up to their intense resentments and longings. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I have worked at close range with military veterans who had sustained serious spinal injuries that left them terribly crippled, and I can attest that the rage displayed in this film – especially by the two younger persons with quadriplegia and paraplegia, respectively – is as authentic as the air we breathe. The razor sharp, acidic character who exposes the illusions and masquerades of others is the enraged, impotent paraplegic, Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim), whose truth-telling function here is precisely like that of Randall P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in Cuckoo’s Nest. This raw psychodrama may place too much healing value on angry catharsis, and it may unfairly demean the CBT methods and good intentions of the therapist, but it is riveting, incendiary stuff. (In Norwegian). Grade: B+ (02/08)

ARTICLE 99 (Howard Deutch, US, 1992). THEME: VA HEALTH CARE SYSTEM. Here is an ambitious effort to portray the problems we have always heard about in the Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System, problems that have recently been accentuated and given greater media and political attention in the context of the Afghan and Iraq wars. The story in this film is built upon the indisputable scarcity of resources to take proper care of Veterans at one particular urban VA hospital. Lack of capacity to provide adequate care is taken for granted as a fact of life in the hospital, and a major subtext of the film consists of vignettes displaying the clever, sometimes humorous, lengths to which dedicated doctors on the surgery staff will go to see that patients get what they need (the surgery gang consists of Forest Whitaker, John C. McGinley, Lea Thompson, chief surgeon Ray Liotta and new intern Kiefer Sutherland). Examples include “turfing” patients, shuttling them from ward to ward, that is, even assigning trumped up diagnoses to justify transfers, as a means of providing continuity of care rather than forced discharges, and bootlegging administratively forbidden surgical procedures for people who need them.

Another subtext is the mountainous bureaucracy, long waiting lines, brusque and officious staff, endless sea of paperwork and Catch-22 regulations that drive both patients and health care providers to distraction. “Shooter” Polaski (Leo Burmester), a dangerous hulk who suffers from Vietnam combat-related PTSD, gets a letter from the VA declaring him eligible for “…full and complete medical benefits. However, as your diagnosed condition cannot be specifically related to military service, treatment is not available at this time.” “Article 99” is cited as the authorizing regulation for this notice. Shooter’s response is to rev up his pickup truck and crash into the lobby of the hospital and down a corridor until it finally collides with something bigger. This gets Shooter exactly what he wanted in the first place, namely, care on the psych. unit, where he is looked after by a psychiatrist (Kathy Baker) who has left a lucrative practice in a private substance abuse program, in order to care for Vets.

Yet another subplot concerns a special reason for shortages in the surgery program at this hospital, the clandestine pirating of supplies and money away from patient care in order to fund a costly new surgical research program, a pet project of the unscrupulous hospital director (John Mahoney), himself a physician. When the surgery staff catch on to this scam, war breaks out in earnest between them and the director, a battle that culminates in a huge demonstration and media feeding frenzy in front of the hospital, orchestrated by a powerful patient ringleader, Luther (Keith David), a cool, hip, wheelchair bound, cell phone connected fellow who wears sunglasses at all hours and is decked out in medals and other baubles commemorating his past military experiences and accomplishments. Needless to say, Luther and the good guys win.

I worked in one capacity or another in three different VA facilities from 1959 to 2002, including 15 years as Chief of Psychiatry at a teaching and research-oriented (“academic”) VA hospital (one highly affiliated with a nearby medical school), so I have a decent vantage point from which to judge this movie. Though many details of the film are exaggerated, over-the-top, farcical stuff, following in the tradition of Robert Altman’s MASH and the more successful TV series that followed it, M*A*S*H, there is a crucial core of truth to this story in every one of its subplots.

With regard to scarcity of resources, first realize the enormity of the VA: last time I counted, there were about 170 facilities in the VA system. There has never been sufficient funding from Congress to assure uniformly high quality health care across this vast system. And it’s not run like many franchise operations, say McDonald’s for example, where you get pretty much the same food, or lack of it, anywhere you go. Despite recent efforts to achieve budget parity, there have always been and continue to be “have” VAs and “have nots.” The richer ones get that way because of the successful political influence of Congressional representatives, affiliated medical schools and Veterans organizations on behalf of that particular hospital.

Although VA bureaucratic regulations are staggering in their complexity, self contradictions and ever changing fine print, there is no “Article 99” - that’s a fiction invented for this movie. In fact it is a non sequitur. The only way a Vet can gain guaranteed “full and complete medical benefits” is if the VA judges this person to be suffering from one or more service-connected disabilities, i.e., some condition that was caused by, or began or worsened during, active military duty. Moreover, the total degree of disability from all service-connected conditions must exceed 50% in order to gain comprehensive health care benefits, which means care not only for service-connected problems but any other health care needed, just like in an HMO or at Kaiser. (Lesser extent of disability – under 50% - restricts guaranteed care to that specifically needed for the rated disability, not other health problems.)

So Shooter’s letter is nonsense. What does often occur is that Vets, convinced that their health problems and symptoms were caused by exposure to combat, toxic agents or other hazards when they were in military service, make claims to the VA that are denied. Sometimes these denials are entirely justified. False attribution of illness or disability to military duty usually occurs through honest but poorly informed conviction, or sometimes through a consciously fraudulent attempt to gain pension benefits and free health care. I’ve seen many examples of both.

But it is also true that the VA, like many private corporations, has a sordid track record of unjustified efforts to deny a connection between chronic illness and military duty hazards in order to save money or because of other biases. In the early 1980s, I was able to show that among the four independent VA disability “rating boards” operating in my area, the proportion of claims for combat-related PTSD that were approved varied from 4% by one rating board to nearly 50% by another! Differences obviously way beyond chance. What operated here was a variable of subjective bias among the members of these quasi-judicial review panels.

Whether a Vet who does not have any service connected disability can get health care at a VA facility depends on a host of factors, including how richly funded that particular hospital is, what kinds of care are needed, whether the Vet has other health insurance, and the Vet’s income level. But suffice it to say, many, many Vets find they are refused care or placed on interminable wait lists, and this makes people very angry.

You might think Shooter’s outrageous drive through the hospital in his pickup is pure fiction, but at my hospital, we once had a psychiatric outpatient who tried to crash a small airplane into our psych unit. Miraculously, he crashed in a garden just in front of the building, harming no one but himself. On another occasion, one of our psychologists was summoned to the top of a high water tower elsewhere in the city to “talk down” a desperate Vet needing care. Pretty dramatic stuff. Interestingly, events of this sort happened in the early years of our program, when funding was very threadbare. Later, in an era of greater staff resources and special treatment options, such events ceased.

Luther, by the way, is also the real deal: there’s a Luther or two in every VA patient population. I think of them as “career patients,” eccentric and often charismatic men whose fulfillment in life seems to have peaked during their years in the military, and who now derive their primary identity and self esteem from the prominent, colorful informal positions they create for themselves in the VA hospital milieu.

The scam to rip off patient care resources for research also rings true, sad to say. Shenanigans only a hair less larcenous have been customary in dozens of medical school-affiliated VA hospitals over the years. I myself diverted over $150,000 annually for many years to subsidize nationally prominent researchers on my patient care payroll. This gave our program prestige and gloss, locally and system-wide, helped attract high quality young recruits to our staff, and carried weight when we had to compete with other specialties for new patient care budget allocations. In the long run, patient care was enhanced by this strategy. Spending money to make money. That’s the way the game was played in many research-oriented VAs. Recent reform efforts have reduced, but not eliminated, such gaming.

There’s one key aspect where things don’t ring true. Regrettably, in most VA hospitals with strong academic missions, and allowing for many exceptions, it still must be said that often staff physicians tend to give only secondary priority to compassionate, empathic patient care. Sometimes senior physicians rotate from the medical school to supervise care on VA wards; they may have little sense of identification with the specific mission to serve Veterans. Both staff physicians and residents tend to see their VA patients as “cases” providing opportunities for practicing “procedures.” On surgical services, bedside care is often left to interns with the least training.

There is another group of health care professionals in ancillary services: nurses, social workers, psychologists, speech therapists, physical therapists, recreational therapists and so on. In my experience, a majority of staff in these ancillary services show high levels of idealism, empathy and dedication to patient care. The role of the top hospital managers in academic VA hospitals is to somehow navigate a course in which some balance is maintained between the missions of good patient care and research and training, always with an eye on the budget, which is never sufficient to accomplish everything everyone wants.

My problem with this film has to do with its dramatic aims and structure. On the one hand, it strives to be a social exposé film, on the other, an over-the-top comedy. In trying to have it both ways, I think its impact in both directions is muted. The film works better as social criticism. As for comedy, Ray Liotta is no Alan Alda, and Kathy Baker is no Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman. A few supporting players in small roles are left to shoulder the humor load here: John C. McGinley, Keith David and Leo Burmester. The little love subplots - Liotta and Baker, Sutherland and Thompson – add nothing to the merriment. This is a decent effort, but it could have used more bite and more humor. Grades: drama: B-; portrayal of VA system problems: B+ (11/04)

AS GOOD AS IT GETS (James L. Brooks, US, 1997)  THEMES: OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER; OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE PERSONALITY DISORDER.  Jack Nicholson is the OCD patient.  He’s quite convincing and realistic at first. His symptoms are realistic. But his heart is melted by the charms of a waitress (Helen Hunt) in a transformation that a person with OCPD would be incapable of achieving.  Grades: (on dramatic grounds): B; (on clinical authenticity): C+ (02/98)

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON (Niels Mueller, US, 2004, 95 min.). THEME: MAN WITH PARANOID PERSONALITY DISORDER, WITH OBSESSIONAL FEATURES, WHO DECOMPENSATES INTO A DELUSIONAL PARANOID PSYCHOTIC STATE. In truth, Samuel Byck was a 44 year old business man down on his luck when, in 1974, delusionally convinced that Richard Nixon was the cause of his personal problems, he attempted to hijack an airliner and have it flown into the White House to kill the President. He did kill two men and shot another in the airport before being shot himself and then ending his own life with a gunshot to the head. Now Sean Penn plays this tormented character (he’s named Samuel Bicke here) in a screen adaptation of the Byck story.

Bicke is living alone, long separated from his wife Marie (Naomi Watts) though he wants to be with her again. He’s had a falling out with his brother Julius (Michael Wincott), who owns a tire business where Samuel used to work. Now he is selling office furniture. Whatever Samuel does, he can’t seem to measure up to what others want from him. His new boss Jack (Jack Thompson) keeps coaching him on salesmanship but to little avail. His only real source of emotional support is a longsuffering buddy Bonny (Don Cheadle) who tries to talk Samuel down when he’s feeling put upon.

And Samuel feels put upon just about every waking minute. Samuel can’t for the life of him see that he does anything wrong to deserve the hassles he feels everyone in his life gives him. He is full of anguish; his torment is palpable. He so much wants to succeed in business and win back his family. But like most people with paranoid personalities, and many who are obsessive by nature, he has little awareness of his own quirks and the effects of his behavior on others. He cannot see what we see. That he is intrusive and controlling with Marie; that he lacks restraint and any hint of tenderness or even empathy toward her. That he is devoid of the congeniality and self confidence of a successful salesman.

When things don’t go well, he blames others. He doesn’t want to blame his wife for their domestic troubles: he still has her placed high on a pedestal of idealization. So he blames the man she’s dating who drives a Cadillac. He’s one of those rich guys, Samuel concludes. It’s rich guys who have the power to cause trouble for little guys like himself, so goes Samuel’s thinking. Rich guys just take what they want. It’s the same at work. Samuel’s way of understanding Jack’s dissatisfaction with his poor sales performance is that Jack just wants to exploit him, turn him into a disingenuous puppet who’ll lie through his teeth just to sell something to some poor stiff so Jack can get rich.

As circumstances at work and with Marie deteriorate, Samuel becomes more desperate. He seizes upon a farfetched idea for a new tire business and applies for a federal small business loan. He orders an inventory of tires on his brother’s account, without permission, and has them sent to Bonny’s auto repair shop. And then everything comes tumbling down around him. He loses his job (he provokes the boss into firing him). Marie has him served with divorce papers. His loan is denied. Bonny is temporarily jailed for receiving stolen goods (the tires). Samuel’s brother disowns him. It’s simply too much for this precariously balanced man to bear, and he goes bonkers. He decides that the federal loan was denied because his intended business partner is black: it’s a case of racism, pure and simple.

And who’s behind all the shenanigans of the rich, the powerful, the racists? Why, Richard Nixon, of course.

So in the film’s waning moments, we see Bicke’s pathetic attempt to hijack an airliner, ending in the grievous shootings reenacted here from the original Byck scenario. (Byck, incidentally, had been hospitalized once in the past for psychiatric treatment. Penn’s long taped rant to Leonard Bernstein in the film was illustrative of similar activities by Byck that went on for over two years before the shootings. Byck sent rants to Jonas Salk and Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, as well as Mr. Bernstein.)

I think this is the very best dramatization of the plight of a person with a paranoid personality disorder I’ve seen enacted on film. Mueller and Penn manage to avoid a one-dimensional profile of the central character. Penn’s Samuel Bicke is neither a monstrous predator nor a sentimental victim. He is not callous or calculating. He is human. We can clearly see his suffering, his torment. He’s really quite an innocent, as paranoid people often are. He’s baffled by the mystery of his own misery.

We can see with equal clarity the central flaw in Samuel’s character of externalizing blame, of projecting the causes of his suffering onto others, the people to whom he accords the power that is the opposite of the weakness he experiences in himself. Personal strength comes though self knowledge. If you are blind to your own foibles, how can you contain or temper them, or turn them to any advantage? Tibetan Buddhist teachers describe the unenlightened man as a headless horseman in full gallop mode. That’s what Penn gives in his portrayal of Samuel Bicke.

I Shot Andy Warhol is another film in which a person with a paranoid personality decompensates into a homicidal psychotic state. That too is a story based on fact, and Lili Taylor is chillingly effective in playing the paranoid woman, Valerie Solanas. The supporting cast here in Assassination - Ms. Watts, Cheadle, Thompson, Wincott and Nick Searcy, a longsuffering federal loan officer – are uniformly fine. This was a directing debut for Mueller. Grades: overall drama, B; clinical authenticity of Penn’s performance: A- (05/05)

ASSISTED LIVING (Elliot Greenebaum, US, 2005, 78 min.). THEMES: GERIATRICS: LIFE IN NURSING HOMES AND ASSISTED LIVING FACILITIES; MARIJUANA DEPENDENCE (TODD THE ORDERLY). This quirky, unsettling little film concerns the daily life of elderly residents and staff in an assisted living facility. The tone weaves back and forth between understated comic drollery and a more somber evocation of the preoccupations and humdrum existence of everyone who lives and works there. The central character is a young man in his late 20s, a pot smoking rumpled slacker named Todd (Michael Bonsignore), who functions as a janitor and orderly when not being called on the carpet by the administrator for absenteeism and being late for work. (The administrator himself is no rose, swigging shots of whiskey amidst office business.)

Forever in need of a shower and shave, Todd seems incapable of engaging genuinely with anybody except the charge nurse’s little daughter, who’s always around. He even lets the facility’s pet Golden Retriever escape, a gesture of dubious merit for the welfare of either the dog or anyone else. And yet he finds himself unable to resist responding - always reluctantly and with no real hint of enthusiasm - to the emotional neediness of the residents. When old folks ask him about the Hereafter, Todd has them dial up Heaven on the phone, then answers their calls from another room, where he tells one woman that she can be with both her deceased husbands in Heaven, or simply pick the one she prefers, and that there is plenty of sex but no concern about bodies.

Another resident, Mrs. Pearlman (Maggie Riley), develops a special fondness for Todd as a surrogate for her son, who’s gone to Australia to live. She now and then confuses their identities. Using the old surefire telephone trick, Todd pretends to answer her calls to Australia, and later frees her from an observation ward for an unauthorized breath of fresh air outdoors. But, again, it’s not at all clear that the blank faced Todd has any real empathy for the woman. It seems more a matter of following whatever impulse will decompress a momentary, emotionally awkward situation. We are left to wonder about the extent of similar motives in determining how elders are generally cared for in institutions.

First time filmmaker Elliot Greenebaum started shooting this movie in 2001 at age 22, at a nursing home in his native Kentucky, using the staff and nursing home patients as extras alongside his actors. The effect is to make his film seem very much like a documentary. The home, run by the Masons, is a well appointed place: clean, airy, brightly lit up, full of activities. An especially useful device is Greenebaum’s close up filming of the aged, typically bejeweled hands of the residents as they wash, apply makeup or play Bingo.

While not a great movie, Assisted Living does have impact. One leaves the theater pensively, pondering the gravity of growing old and winding up living in such a place, where Heaven is only a local phone call away and one’s own arthritic hands are often the most reliable companions. Grade: B (05/05)

AUTISM: THE MUSICAL (Tricia Regan, US, 2007, 93 min.). THEME: AUTISM. At a private school for autistic children in Los Angeles, one of the mothers undertakes the direction of a student musical production which she labels the “Miracle Project.” We follow five kids, who vary in age, speech, motor behavior and sociability, and their parents through several months of rehearsals and then see part of the actual show. The school scene is fairly chaotic. Some of the parents are pretty volatile as well. (Musician Stephen Stills is one of the fathers and is well behaved.) The chaos is accentuated by the style of the editing, which often features a barrage of very brief cuts among several scenes and camera angles. There’s a decent idea behind this frenetic film, i.e., to humanize autistic kids and their families, but it could have been better realized. (A grant will provide for another Miracle Project production at the school next year.) Grade: B (01/08)

AUTUMN SPRING (Babí léto) (Vladimir Michálek, Czech Republic, 2001, 95 m.) SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: AGING IN PLACE; RELATIONSHIPS IN OLD AGE: MARITAL, INTERGENERATIONAL; FRIENDSHIP. Superb drama with delicious comedic touches concerning the challenges of aging. Franda and Emilie (played brilliantly by Vlastimil Brodsky and Stella Zazvokova) are in their late 70s. Franda is a rogue, a retired actor who spends his time with another retired actor friend pulling various cons for fun (they visit a lavish estate that is on sale, for example, masquerading as a wealthy retired opera star and his manager). These adventures require money, which Franda pilfers from Emilie's carefully managed household accounts, then lying about it, all of which drives Emelie wild. At one point, their son wants to move his ex-wife and their kids into the old couple’s apartment, which requires that they give it up and move to an old people’s domicile. Franda won’t hear of it and engages his buddy in a stunt in which they feign Franda’s death, presumably caused by the stress of the impending move.

That prank pushes Emilie one step too far. She files for divorce, but in a touching courtroom scene, it becomes clear that after 44 years together, Emilie and Franda still do love one another. Franda as usual vows to mend his ways and, for the first time, he does, giving up smoking, alcohol and his fraudulent adventures. The effect of Franda’s reformed behavior on Emilie is surprisingly negative. She misses the zestful old rogue and laments the dull partner Franda has become. An altogether charming tale, full of wisdom about the manner in which long married people accommodate to one another’s foibles and find that it is not always a good thing to get the changes in a partner that you've wished for.

This was the last role for Mr. Brodsky, after a long career (he starred in the Czech classics, Closely Watched Trains and Jacob the Liar). The director previously made the excellent films, Forgotten Light and Sekal Has to Die. (In Czech) Grade: A- (08/06)

AUTUMN SUN (Sol de onoño) (Eduardo Mignogna, Argentina, 1996).  THEME: NEW LOVE IN OLD AGE. Clara (the beguiling actress Norma Aleandro) and Raul (Federico Luppi) come together under contrived circumstances and proceed, against expectations, to fall in love. This story of love blossoming in later life tenderly discloses the special nuances of love and aging: the loneliness, risks, misgivings, impulses to seize fleeting opportunities, and the transformations. (In Spanish) Grade: B (03/97)

AVALON (Barry Levinson, US, 1992). THEMES: CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE; FAMILY DYNAMICS; INTERGENERATIONAL CONFLICTS. Levinson's semi-autobiographical account of childhood in a Baltimore family dominated by the grandfather, Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his brothers, Russian Jews who immigrated early in the 20th Century to make a better life here. This is a highly nostalgic film, full of clichés about immigrant families and the succeeding generations. But the film finds strength and authenticity in the reflections given here (clichés, after all, could not become what they are except as frequently bidden, time honored facets of some reality). Rough patches, family conflicts and the petty annoyances of daily life are honored, not just the good times. Mueller-Stahl, Joan Plowright (as his wife, Eva), Aidan Quinn (as his son), Elizabeth Perkins (the daughter in law), and Kevin Pollak (cousin Izzy) all contribute fine work here. Grade: A- (09/02)

THE AVIATOR (Martin Scorsese, US, 2004, Miramax, 169 min.). THEMES: OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER; PERSONALITY DISORDER WITH PARANOID, OBSESSIONAL, NARCISSISTIC AND SCHIZOID FEATURES; PARANOID PSYCHOSIS. This new biopic about Howard Hughes is at once a vivid portrait of one of America’s most enigmatic 20th century public figures and also a frustratingly superficial probe into the character of this strange man. It’s not a matter of material being unavailable to the filmmakers, material that could have given more depth to a portrayal of Hughes’s personality and motivations. (See my addendum to this review for illustrative facts that help illuminate the man.)

I think it is more that Mr. Scorsese is not partial to psychologizing about his characters, attempting to portray “interior” information about what makes somebody tick, or even going deeply into childhood experience or family roots for this purpose. (He gives us just one such image, a recurring one: a five year old Hughes is being bathed by his mother, who coos to him about how the world is a hazardous place.) Scorsese has certainly had an abiding interest in outsized, eccentric and disturbed personalities (think of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ,and Bringing Out the Dead). But he has a perspective about the uses of film, this most visual of all storytelling media. He has always been primarily interested in photographable surfaces, intent upon showing us the conduct, the actions that emanate from a character’s personality, and leaving it at that, very much in the Hollywood filmmaking tradition.

This film focuses on a 20 year period of Hughes’s life, from about age 22 to 42 (1927-1947). It begins two years after he moved from Texas to Los Angeles to make movies. As the film opens Hughes, played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio, is directing his epic aviation flick, Hell’s Angels, about British fighter pilots going up against the Germans in World War I. The film ends with Hughes’s own post-World War II battles before a senate committee investigating his disposal of government funds contracted for military aircraft production, and his ever so short flight of the “Spruce Goose."

Along the way we are made privy to his restive romantic relations with Catharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and, later, Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale); his daringly innovative, hands-on involvement in the development of new aircraft designs, working with people like Glenn “Odie” Odekirk (Matt Ross); his often reckless financial wheeling and dealing, implemented by his faithful business manager, Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly); and his more shrewd battle of wits with rival airline executive Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and Trippe’s conspiratorial political chum, Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda). These relationships are all well acted and absorbing.

We do learn some important things about Hughes’s personality. The film shows us quite convincingly that he was a visionary who would sacrifice endless time, energy, money, relationships, personal safety and even other people’s lives in the effort to fulfill his visions, which always concerned one or the other of his two great passions: aircraft design and filmmaking. Mr. DiCaprio also demonstrates quite credibly that Hughes was a severely disturbed, deeply neurotic individual who was susceptible to psychotic episodes. We see that he was not warmhearted, but rather an emotionally cool, often aloof, always self-centered person.

His obsessive compulsive symptoms, such as ritual hand washing, muttering some phrase over and over, and phobic responses to clutter, were apparent already in those years of Hughes’s young adulthood, and we witness his bizarre behavior, probably a paranoid psychotic episode, when he isolated himself for weeks on end, in 1947 or shortly before. The film’s scene sequence suggests that Hughes pulled himself together, i.e., was able to suppress and end his psychotic episode, in response to the challenge of the Senate hearings before which he was subpoenaed to testify. While I do not know if this sequence is factually accurate, I have certainly seen clinical situations in which patients suffering from acute psychosis experienced complete cessation of delusional and hallucinatory symptoms in response to a realistic stressor requiring their full attention and coping capacity, e.g., the sudden need for surgery.

Leonardo DiCaprio ably captures the complex, mercurial nuances of Hughes’s fragmented personality. He can show the strain, the chilling aloofness, the gritty determination, the shrewd capacity for thrust and parry, the social anxiety, the momentary joy of success, the domineering, imperial manner of demanding that others do his bidding. It’s all there, all believable. The only bothersome thing is DiCaprio’s voice. The slight Texas drawl is fine. It’s the youthful timbre that bothered me. Maybe Hughes had such a boyish voice, maybe not. It does distract somewhat from the gravitas of Hughes’s several personas. It is a constant reminder that Hughes is being played by a young actor. The other players are adequate or better, especially Blanchett, Reilly, Alda and Ross.

This may not be a great film but it a thoroughly absorbing entertainment that, as far as it goes, depicts and also celebrates one of the most unusual characters of our times. Grade: B+ (12/28/04)

Add: Here are some things you won’t discover or understand very well watching The Aviator. Howard Robard Hughes Jr. - known as Sonny - was born in the oil town of Humble, Texas on September 24, 1905. He died on April 5, 1976, at the age of 71, of apparent heart failure on an airplane carrying him from Acapulco to Houston to seek medical treatment. X-rays taken during the autopsy showed fragments of hypodermic needles broken off in his arms.

His father was the outlaw wildcatter Howard (Bo) Robard Hughes; his mother, the neurotic Dallas heiress Allene Gano. Hughes himself would always be half outlaw - defying justice – and half fragile – a self-centered neurasthenic. Two men who helped shape his character were his grandfather, the monomaniac Iowa Judge Felix Hughes, and his brilliant Jekyll-and-Hyde uncle, the celebrated best-selling novelist and Broadway playwright Rupert Hughes, who also wrote screenplays for MGM.

Howard Hughes Jr. was arguably the most secretive, unconventional and self-destructive man ever to win fame in Southern California’s two glamour industries - movies and aviation. He grew up an indifferent student with a liking for mathematics, flying and things mechanical. He audited math and engineering classes at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and later at the Rice Institute of Technology in Houston. Orphaned in 1924, the 18-year-old Hughes took control of his father’s tool company, an estate valued at almost $900,000. Although shy and retiring, Hughes became enamored with the motion picture industry and moved to Los Angeles in 1925. He financed three films of varying quality before undertaking Hell’s Angels.

As an aviator, he once held every speed record of consequence and was hailed as the world’s greatest flyer. Howard Hughes’ greatest legacy to Southern California is the family of Hughes companies founded during his lifetime. Based in Westchester, west of central Los Angeles, Hughes Space and Communications is today the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial satellites - the designer and builder of the world’s first synchronous communications satellite, Syncom, and the producer of nearly 40% of the satellites now in commercial service. Hughes Electronics is owned by General Motors. Hughes Aircraft merged with Raytheon Company in 1998 and is now called Raytheon Systems Co. Prior to the merger Hughes Aircraft was a world leader in high technology systems for scientific, military and global applications.

Throughout his Hollywood years, Hughes maintained his passion for flying. In 1934 he won his first speed title flying a converted Boeing pursuit plane 185 miles per hour. He and a young Caltech engineer, Dick Palmer, then built a plane called the H-1 (featuring a unique retractable landing gear), which Hughes piloted to a new speed record of 352 mph near Santa Ana, California. This was in 1935, the year that Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company as a division within Hughes Tool Company, operating out of a hangar in Burbank, California.

From about 1944 on, Hughes began exhibiting alarming behavior and a phobia of germs, which led to a mental breakdown. His fear of germs was made worse by a drug habit that included both Codeine and later Valium; the codeine had first been prescribed to alleviate pain from injuries incurred in the XF-11 plane crash several years earlier. The germ obsession began in his youth (due in large part to an overly protective mother) and steadily heightened throughout his adulthood. Even as early as the 1940s he required all those who came in contact with the same things that he touched to wear white gloves. His servants had to handle everything with tissues. In 1958 he apparently suffered a second mental breakdown. Of his days living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, biographers D. L. Bartlett and J. B. Steele (in their 1979 book, “Empire: the Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes”) write that: "Hughes spent almost all his time sitting naked in [his white leather chair] in the center of the living room – an area he called the ‘germ free zone’ – his long legs stretched out on the matching ottoman facing a movie screen, watching one motion picture after another.”

Hughes’ behavior became increasingly irrational; he lived the life of a drug addicted, bed-ridden hermit. Although Hughes managed to attend to business and had many periods of lucidity, his physical health had turned precarious. In 1973 he was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio. A member of his 1938 around-the-world flight crew represented him, calling him "…a modest, retiring, lonely genius; often misunderstood, sometimes misrepresented and libeled by malicious associates and greedy little men."

In his final years he abruptly moved his residence from one place to another – the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Canada, England, Las Vegas, and Mexico - arriving at each new destination unnoticed, taking elaborate precautions to ensure absolute privacy in a luxury hotel, and rarely being seen by anyone except a few male aides. Often working for days without sleep in a black-curtained room, he became emaciated and deranged from the effects of a meager diet and an excess of drugs. A doctor who examined him in 1973 likened his condition to prisoners he had seen in Japanese prison camps during World War II. Hughes spent the final chapter of his life in Mexico – a mentally ill recluse, wasted in body, incoherent in thought, alone in the world except for his doctors and bodyguards. ---This information was adapted from a longer bio sketch prepared in 2002 and posted on the WebSand website at: http://www.allsands.com (click on Entertainment/ People, then, under “miscellaneous” click on “Howard Hughes – biography.”)

AWAY FROM HER (Sarah Polley, Canada, 2006, 110 m.). SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: ALZHEIMER’S DEMENTIA; IMPACT OF DEMENTIA ON NON-AFFLICTED SPOUSES. Canadian actor Sarah Polley makes a feature writer-director debut of sorts here (she had previously created several shorts and one largely unnoticed feature), with a film about the adaptation of older adults to the development of Alzheimer’s dementia, based on a story by Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

The story involves two older couples, each with a dementing spouse. The afflicted persons, Fiona (Julie Christie) and Aubrey (Michael Murphy) have taken up residence in the same assisted living facility and become deeply attached to one another. Their respective spouses, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Marian (Olympia Dukakis), both vexed and lonely, meet outside the facility and strike up an intimate relationship of mutual comfort and convenience.

The dramatic elements in the film derive from these simple facts: the tensions, denial, sadness and even jealousies that debilitate the spouses whose loved ones are ill; and the coping efforts made by everyone to survive, to combat isolation, to somehow get through the pathetic, heart rending realities that dementia visits upon married couples and families, suffering that is unavoidable for the afflicted and non-afflicted alike.

From a clinical point of view, the film is a decidedly mixed bag: in several respects highly authentic and, in others, frustratingly inaccurate. Let’s start with the positives. All four principal actors are superb. Ms. Christie, a relatively “cool” actress, given to emotionally understated performances, is quite able to represent the subdued affectivity often associated with early Alzheimers in a more convincing fashion than could more emotionally “warm” actors like Gena Rowlands in Notebook or Dame Judi Dench in Iris. Michael Murphy’s Aubrey is even better, though it is a smaller supporting role. Aubrey has a more advanced case of dementia: call it the middle stage of Alzheimers, if you will. He has a vacant stare most of the time, has lost speech, tends toward immobility and, partly as a consequence, considerable motor stiffness. The picture is clinically perfect for this stage of the disease.

Mr. Pinsent and Ms. Dukakis portray differing yet entirely believable non-afflicted spouses. Pinsent’s Grant is by turns gravely worried about his wife, bereft and lonely when he is separated from her, and given to denial of her illness: all common responses of loved ones in the earlier stages. Ms. Dukakis's Marian is more the realist, accepting of the finality of the disease and the fact that Aubrey will never again be her husband in any real sense of that term. Of course she has logged more years of suffering, witnessing her husband’s further decline, and this longer exposure almost inevitably leads the healthy spouse eventually to abandon any illusions about the disease.

Some viewers might doubt the realism of Fiona’s immediate, affectionate and nearly total attachment to Aubrey in the care facility, but I can assure you that such attachments are not uncommon and often valuable, a coping strategy that can be an immense source of security and an antidote to isolation for the afflicted “couple,” though not infrequently a cause of concern and conflict for family and staff alike. When Marian removes Aubrey from the care facility, Fiona's depressive response is entirely convincing and predictable. And when the nursing aid Kristy (Kristen Thomson) tells Grant that he should expect Fiona’s condition to fluctuate a lot from day to day, she’s correct.

Then we get to the negatives. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Fiona’s placement in residential care (assisted living) is justified. Fiona reads books about Alzheimers and takes the initiative to seek her own placement. Grant is opposed to this: he wants her to remain at home. This inverts the far more common situation. Most people with early Alzheimers – even the brightest and most insightful, [I’ve encountered university English professors, even Oxford dons, with the disorder] – don’t acknowledge that they are ill, have no interest in reading about Alzheimers, and are vehement in protesting their placement outside the home in residential care. Their healthy spouses feel the same way: the last thing they want is to give up personally caring for their beloved partner. They do so typically only when their spouse’s abnormal behaviors exceed their capacity to cope, usually after a period of many months to years of struggling to manage things at home.

On the contrary in this movie, we see Fiona generally behaving quite acceptably. Yes, she shows marked memory loss and spatial disorientation. She puts the washed frying pan in the refrigerator. She wanders away once and is unaccounted for for many hours. But she shows no signs of psychotic, aggressive, agitated or depressive behaviors, and doesn’t get into any truly dangerous scrapes. Her social skills remain more than adequate, typical in the first stages of the illness. Grant seems quite capable of managing things with Fiona at home and prefers this course to continue. Institutionalizing her at this point rings entirely false here.

It is also clinically wrong that, given her generally favorable level of functioning, Fiona should have so much difficulty recognizing Grant when he comes to visit after the first month she is in care. Even if she cannot recall his name, she should still easily be able to acknowledge that he is her spouse, or at least a familiar loved one, and react accordingly.

For that matter, the policy of the assisted living facility (in this film) that prohibits any visitation by loved ones in the first month after placement is way off the mark. That’s SOP for residential addictions treatment, but everyone who knows anything about dementia acknowledges the importance of sustaining the familiar when a major move occurs: arranging for favorite articles of clothing, family photos, prints from home hung on the walls, other mementos, and, especially, visitation by loved ones, from the getgo, to provide continuity and ease the inevitable apprehension in circumstances of abrupt change that is experienced by the afflicted individual.

I scrutinized the end credits in vain looking for a credit for any professional geriatric mental health or dementia consultant or agency. Regrettably, the lack of such input shows here. Of course filmmakers are under no obligation to make their productions clinically authentic. But there is no reason not to do so either. For example, insertion of a few fleeting scenes together lasting less than five minutes - a fire on a neglected stove burner; a weary, haggard Grant after spending a night searching for a wandering Fiona on yet another of those escapades, or Grant simply telling a doctor about such - could have established Fiona's need for assisted living. It’s rather like my partner’s pet peeve. She was a prodigious violist in adolescence, and she almost leaps screaming from her seat in films that show simulated and flagrantly unrealistic violin playing in a movie, when it would have been so easy and inexpensive to shoot and intercut a little close up footage of a real player. Oh, well.