EDI  (Piotr Trzaskalski, Poland, 2003).  THEME: AN UNUSUAL CHARACTER WHO LIVES OUT THE ETHICAL AND MORAL PRECEPTS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. Edi (Henryk Golebiewski) and his sidekick Jurek are part of a subculture in Warsaw that is a smidge higher on the social scale than skid road. They make a few zlotkys a day scavenging metal scrap, enough to buy booze and a little food.  They share a fairly comfortable space in a deserted building. No electricity, but it is dry and they have a decent bed.  The film concerns Edi's character - his personality and temperament, that is - and the relationship between the two men, who could not be more dissimilar. Jurek is severely alcoholic and sort of a dreamy fool.  He thinks TV images are more real than his life.  Edi couldn't disagree more, not that he's prone to argue a point.  He is the supreme realist.  He accepts the facts and the inevitability of his own life’s arc.  A mild mannered man, he cares for himself pretty well (doesn't smoke, only binge drinks) and is a bit of a scholar: he keeps a refrigerator full of classics like Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."  

Bad things happen to Edi before this film is done.  But he and Jurek survive, and with a certain dignity at that.  There is an elusive, enchanting quality to this film.  It imparts an intriguing feeling of serenity, even though it often portrays some rough stuff.  This feeling is established in the very first scenes: of rain falling on the surface of a lake, of children playing on a dock there, scenes that are repeated with variations throughout the film.  But I think the main source is Edi himself, who is so serene.  Like Gandhi, he quietly and humbly faces adversity in a nonviolent manner that has profound effects on others.  Although Edi's acceptance of his life matches the dictionary meaning of the term 'fatalist,'  I hesitate to use that term because it is commonly used to imply pessimism and helplessness about one's fate.  That's not Edi at all.  He is able to act in a beneficent, constructive manner whenever the possibility for such conduct presents itself.  He knows that at times his actions can make a difference.  He works actively to identify such moments, for example, when he gives a present to a child.  He is in fact a living realization of what is taught in Alcoholics Anonymous. He knows how to tell the difference between those things he can change and those he cannot, to act on the former and resign himself peaceably (not defeatedly) to the latter.  At 100 minutes, this film plays shorter, though the pace is never hurried and often feels languid. A remarkable film!  (In Polish)  Grade:  A- (02/03)

THE EEL (Unagi) (Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1998). THEMES: AVOIDANT PERSONALITY; GUILT OVER BAD BEHAVIOR; REDEMPTION; UNRESOLVED GRIEF. Character study of a painfully socially reticent man, possibly sexually inhibited (as he is accused of being by a fellow ex-con near the end of the film), whose aloofness is further driven by his shame for having served time in prison, his concomitant fear of involvements that could lead him back to prison, and his unresolved grief about the death of his wife ("when I killed her, I died too," he says). Here is the storyline. A businessman viciously stabs to death his unfaithful wife, having caught her in the act of making love with another man. After serving 8 years in prison, he is paroled to a small riverside village, where he opens a barbershop, plying the trade he learned in prison. Several locals become his friends, including the priest who serves as his parole officer, the priest's wife, an eccentric man who has created an imaginative landing site for UFOs, a coffin maker full of passion for fishing, and a young stylish fellow with a hot pink convertible.

The barber rescues a young woman in coma following an overdose, and subsequently she takes up residence with the priest and his wife. She becomes the barber's devoted and loving assistant, after which the shop flourishes, until an old boyfriend comes after her with a vengeance, upsetting everything. The character study works: it rings true. The group of locals surrounding the barber are engaging. They are more modern than he, expecting and encouraging a love affair between the barber and the young woman, which only stiffens the barber's diffidence. She in turn conveys a traditional, utterly subservient attitude toward the barber (but not toward her old boyfriend, whom she counterattacks with great fury). The photography is magnificent, especially views along the river. The eel was a prison pet the barber brings along with him to live in an aquarium in the barbershop. The eel's life is sometimes precarious, and the barber finally, toward the end of the film, sets it free in the river, letting us know that his own spirit now is at least a mite freer than it was. Imamura took his third Cannes Palme d'Or for this film.(In Japanese) Grade: B+ (06/00)

THE EIGHTH DAY  (Jaco van Dormael, Belgium/France, 1996). THEMES: LOVING RELATIONSHIPS; DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITY (ADULT; DOWN SYNDROME); A beautiful, richly imagined film about love. Harry (Daniel Auteuil), a sales executive recently separated from his wife and two young daughters, finds a friend and role model for the importance of loving attachments in Georges (Pascal Duquenne), a young man who has Down Syndrome. Among several extraordinary scenes is one in which Georges watches from a window while the young woman he fancies practices a ballet number with another young woman (both have Down Syndrome) at the studio across the street. The film opens with an especially magical sequence based on the biblical account of the 7 days of creation (hence the film's title). Duquenne gives a performance that spares no detail of the emotional turmoil and prejudice experienced by Down adults, and it rings entirely true. The film itself does not maintain the magical feeling established at the beginning, later on resorting to a crazy, TV style episode, - when the gang from the group home steals a van, driving it through a shopping mall - to achieve a dramatic turning point in the story. But the central roles are wonderfully enacted. Auteuil and Duquenne shared the Cannes "Best Actor" award in 1996 for their work here. (In French) Grade: B+ (10/99)

ELEPHANT (Gus Van Sant, US, 2003, 81 min.). THEMES: ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE,MORALITY AND DISENGAGEMENT; EATING DISORDERS (BRIEF SCENE) . Elephant is writer-director Van Sant’s take on the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, and it is quite unlike Michael Moore’s in Bowling for Columbine. Moore used the Columbine tragedy to attack our national gun culture and make his customary self-aggrandizing display of performance art. Van Sant’s film is the polar opposite. It makes no pretense of being a documentary. It is a quiet, stylized enactment of events surrounding the shootings. There are no talking heads. In fact there is almost no dialogue at all.

Van Sant shows how easy it is to order antipersonnel weapons by mail, but he doesn’t make a big deal about it. He offers no easy explanations here. What he does is something Moore curiously overlooked: he focuses on the students. Shot locally (Van Sant’s adopted hometown is Portland), the film features non-actors in all the adolescent roles, students recruited by Van Sant from Portland high schools.

In a lyrical, surreal manner he depicts a central theme: an emotional core and a larger ambiance of ennui and indifference, loneliness and lassitude, that is apparent in everyone, kids and adults alike. This malaise, this deep disconnect, reaches out to grip the viewer, conveying the sense that nothing is quite real or matters much to these people. An elephant really could lumber through the dining room here unnoticed; or, people might even see it but not be upset or pay it more than passing attention. We are caught up in a grotesque, inchoate dream. The quietude, the long tracking shots, and non-linear plot development (several sequences are repeated, recursively, from differing perspectives) ratchet up tension.

Kjell needs Elling’s sense of order and also his intercession to create a love life.  Elling needs to hold Kjell’s hand to go to the store.  Never mind the fact that Elling sheds his fears unrealistically as the film progresses.  He remains a casebook example of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.  From this overdrawn odd couple situation evolves a marvelously quirky, good natured, hilarious comedy about how people on the margins help each other negotiate life. This film is far superior to the 'prequel' that followed it, Mors Elling. (In Norwegian)  Grade: A- (10/02)

ELVIRA MADIGAN  (Bo Widerberg, Sweden, 1967). THEME: ADOLESCENT SUICIDE.  Pia Degermark is luminous as a teenager enamored of a soldier.  He goes AWOL to be with her, and this act tragically seals their fate.  (In Swedish) Grade: A (09/98)

EMPATHY  (Amie Siegel, US, 2004).  THEMES: PSYCHOTHERAPY; PROCESS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHODYNAMIC THERAPY; BOUNDARY ISSUES IN TREATMENT.  In Empathy, both documentary and fictional approaches are used to examine what director Amie Siegel terms the “tricky intimacy” that exists between psychoanalysts and their patients.  Ms. Siegel, who also wrote the screenplay, is a poet and visual artist who is interested in spectatorship and how people represent themselves to others.  The psychoanalytic situation is rich soil for examining these interests, since both analyst and patient typically, perhaps always, represent themselves in special ways, subject to special constraints and modes of withholding.  They role play. 

Classical psychoanalysts tend to adhere to Freud’s technique of minimizing disclosure of personal information, in order to facilitate the development of the transference.  The down side of the classical approach is that by withholding personal reactions, the analyst may appear to be uncaring, callous, dismissive or unreal.  This stance of appearing as a “blank slate” may even do harm when patients need a psychotherapist to be a real person, one who engages them with more spontaneity and candor.  Contemporary psychoanalysts are often more inclined to work in an interactive, give-and-take manner.    Patients, for their part, may consciously or unconsciously falsify or withhold information about themselves and their relationships for any number of reasons: fears of embarrassment, humiliation, rejection, punishment, guilt or loss of control, among others.  These are the issues that Ms. Siegel takes up in Empathy. 

To examine these matters, Siegel intermixes footage of four sorts:  interviews with three psychoanalysts; a dramatization of psychoanalytic treatment; the process of making this film; and a segment about the relationship of psychoanalysis to modernism, focusing on architecture and the Eames lounge chair, said to be a favorite among analysts.  Ms. Siegel asks the analysts questions like: Do patients lie to you?  Do you ever lie to them?  Is there an element of performance in your conduct as an analyst?  Do patients also role play in treatment?  Does voyeurism play a role in the analyst’s work? Is empathy spontaneous, or is it more calculated?   The responses the analysts give to such questions are far ranging and, for the most part, convincingly candid. Interspersed with segments from these interviews is the fictional drama in which a depressed woman, Lia (played by actress Gigi Buffington), an aspiring actress, seeks help from another psychoanalyst (played by a real analyst).  We are confronted by a number of issues as we watch their sessions.

The third element interspersed through the film consists of behind-the-scenes shots about the making of this movie.  There are auditions, scenes shot from the perspective of the camera operator, exposed microphone booms, a cocktail party where the actors, psychoanalysts and film crew get together.  A fourth element is an inquiry into the connection between psychoanalysis and modernism.  Architects Philip Johnson and Dion Neutra discuss how modern design is often concerned with minimizing the boundary between interior and exterior spaces, e.g., through the use of large glass panels.   This film is devoted to the examination of a central idea, that there are dual human tendencies to establish boundaries and also to dissolve or overcome them.  Ms. Siegel demonstrates various ways in which boundary issues play out: the boundary between analyst and patient; between what is hidden and what is revealed; role playing versus reality; filmmaking versus film product.  The final scene is telling in this regard.  There is a man in Dr. Solomon’s waiting room seated next to Lia.  She enters the analyst’s office and her session begins.  The man in the waiting room goes up to the closed office door and puts his ear to it.

Empathy is not without flaws, but it is richly imagined, and it makes you think.  It is a provocative, sometimes humorous, useful excursion into the world of therapy.  It tears away some of the mystery surrounding analysis, but stops short of being disrespectful.  Mental health professionals and patients will find this film absorbing, troubling, stimulating.  I am less certain of its reception by general audiences.  The owner of the theater where I saw the film said it bored him the first time through, but he was intrigued enough to watch it a couple more times, and on each re-viewing, he found the film becoming more and more interesting. For additional comment on this film, see my article titled "The 'tricky intimacy' of psychoanalysis." Also, check out the film's website at www.empathythemovie.com. Grade: B+ (for overall quality); A (for examining issues in psychotherapy) (03/04)

EMPTIES (Vratné lahve) (Jan Sverák, Czech Republic, 2007, 100 m.). SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: AGING; POST-RETIREMENT ADJUSTMENT; SEX AND LOVE IN LATER LIFE. Flawless, lighthearted comedy about aging, sex, love, sex and aging, made by Jan Sverák (Kolya, Dark Blue World). Zdenek Sverák, the director’s father, wrote the screenplay and stars as Josef Tkaloun, a 65 year old high school literature teacher who retires rather than face the humiliation of apologizing to an influential family for having punished their smart aleck son for back talking in class. (Zdenek Sverák also wrote the screenplay for Kolya and starred in that film as Franta, world class concert cellist and curmudgeon who is forced to match wits with a five year old boy in his grudging care.) In a word, Empties is way better than Kolya: comedies featuring too-cute kids often have trouble lifting higher than a few feet above ground.

Following his retirement, the immediately bored Tkaloun searches for the right part time job, finally ending up as the empty bottle taker at a supermarket, where he becomes the social hub for customers and staff alike. His longsuffering wife sees him as a fool who does not know his limits, his daughter’s marriage is breaking up, and his sexual fantasy life is expanding dangerously. Where will it all end? There is one side-splitting toss off line after another dotted through this film. Examples. Heard on a TV soap playing in the background of the Tkaloun apartment, She: “Which bank did you put it in?” He: “My money or my sperm?” Or, when Tkaloun and his wife are walking down a sidewalk and another man passes them, Tkaloun says, “That man said ‘Hello’ - now there’s a sign that good manners still exist.” His wife replies, “The man was talking on his mobile.” Or, when a familiar customer reappears after a hiatus, he tells Tkaloun, “I was in detox, my wife sent me, (shaking his head) there was nothing there but alcoholics!”

And on it goes. There’s the lithesome “sexual tornado” who makes tally marks on her belly: is she counting orgasms or what? There’s the old woman with a paranoid psychosis who talks about the people who break into her apartment to swap things and surveille her from a nearby rooftop. There’s the horny brunette teacher, and ‘Hunnertwasser,’ the wife’s devoted German pupil, and on and on. This film is a hoot from start to finish. Impeccable. With Daniela Kolárová as Tkaloun’s wife, supported ably by Nella Boudová, Pavel Landovský, Jiri Machácek and Tatiana Vilhelmová, among other bright lights. (In Czech). Grade: A (02/08)

THE END OF THE AFFAIR (Neil Jordan, UK, 1999). THEMES: LOVE; JEALOUSY. Graham Greene's sadly fated love story. A writer, Morris (Ralph Fiennes), falls in love with Sarah (Julianne Moore), the unhappy wife of a government minister, Henry (Stephen Rea). Their affair takes place in Blitz-wracked London in the early years of WWII and ends abruptly at Sarah's insistence after Morris is nearly killed by a bomb blast, for reasons that are not understood by Morris. Both suffer from being apart and finally they reunite after the war in a tragic denouement to their earlier passion. All three principal actors are outstanding. The story, adapted from Greene's novel by Jordan, is an interesting reflection on the themes of love and jealousy, and on a Godly force as the object of both deep belief and hateful repudiation. Grade: B+ (06/00)

EQUUS  (Sidney Lumet, US, 1977).  THEME: PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK.  Richard Burton (the psychiatrist) and Peter Firth (the patient, a stable boy with a bizarre attachment to horses) provide a dramatically remarkable encounter in Lumet's film of Peter Shaffer's play, Equus, but Burton's psychiatrist is technically atrocious.  Supposedly an expert with young patients, he makes every sort of blunder imaginable: he is asleep in his office when Firth arrives for his first appointment (having impressed upon Firth at their brief initial meeting the importance of punctuality), is emotionally volatile and unpredictable (once in anger he skips a scheduled session with the patient), lets himself be manipulated, and uses hypnosis and placebo drugs without informed consent.  His conduct, in short, is almost entirely self-centered.  He offers an excuse of sorts for his behavior in several powerful soliloquies.  Like the maverick British psychoanalyst, Ronald Laing, whose writings were fashionable at the time Shaffer wrote the play, Burton’s psychiatrist despairs that his patients’ symptoms are desperate signs of sanity in an insane world, and that by curing them he is, like some ancient high priest, sacrificing their individuality on the alter of social conformity.  Grades:  (as drama): B+; (for clinical authenticity): D (09/98)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, US, 2004) THEMES: MEMORY; MEMORY LOSS; DREAMS; LOVE RELATIONSHIPS. Murray Bowen, a pioneer of couples therapy, defied convention by purposely stopping couples from talking to each other during sessions. To accomplish this he would engage one partner in long dialogues while the other was reduced to silent observation. Why? Bowen thought that this would provide an opportunity for the observer to witness their partner in a better light. Engaged in conversation with a relative stranger, he or she would assume a fresher face, in fact a manner reminiscent of the person to whom the observing partner was so attracted in the first place. Accretions of negative experience in relationships have a way of obliterating happier memories of what used to be. Or so it seems.

I thought of Bowen’s method while watching Sunshine, a romantic adventure story about the dire steps taken to end a relationship when a couple’s discouragement with each other looms large, after the infatuated gloss of perfection wears off and the warts begin to show. Dire steps indeed. As everyone in the world must know by now, the young woman, Clementine (Kate Winslet) avails herself of a new high tech brain altering treatment: the selective electronic removal of all memories of former lover Joel (Jim Carrey), at the hands of the good doctor Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his staff, which includes chief assistant Stan (Mark Ruffalo playing against type as a whiny nerd) and receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) who, we eventually discover, was also once a patient of Dr. Mierzwiak’s. Joel inadvertently discovers what Clem has done and in outrage arranges to have his memories of her erased.

The film opens after both characters have completed the procedure. They meet again while coincidentally heading for a beach where they had first met, suggesting that some nuances of their former shared experiences remain, however vague these may be. This is the first subtle hint of the genius behind this story. They don’t recognize each other, of course, but they are mutually attracted, just as they had been originally, two years earlier. We then proceed via flashbacks to review their first encounter, early love and it’s later souring. Clementine’s breezy impulsivity, Joel’s shy conservatism, features that once beckoned as delights, become sources of acrimony. When Clem’s finally had her fill of Joel’s critical suspicions about her fidelity, she goes for the memory erasure. Doesn’t sound like much more than a little sci-fi short story, does it? Well, it’s much more. Carrey, in a role nearly devoid of his patented physical comedy, is entirely convincing as the sober, almost melancholic Joel. Winslet likewise seems entirely natural as a superficially ditzy but soulful woman who only wants the basics in life: a loving man and a family. Their match of opposites is tender, humorous and believable, as is their fury in falling out.

But that’s not the half of it. The long middle segment of the film traces Joel’s experience of having his memories of Clem erased, and it is done with extraordinary imagination. (I say memories, though the nature of most of Joel's imaginings during the erasure session is much more the stuff of dreams. Critic Stanley Kauffmann calls this hour-long sequence the most convincing dream sequence on film that he knows of.) A scene glimpsed in trailers of people disappearing one by one from the lobby of Grand Central Station as Joel and Clem run through. Books disappearing from a scene in the store where Clem works. A memory merging sequence in which Joel’s easily aroused sense of humiliation is recalled in its primal form when his mother discovers him masturbating. These are only a few of many brief scenes that catch us up like a kaleidoscope. The whole context is so artfully arranged that it easily pulls us in, suspending disbelief and readily accepting the premise of memory erasure as entirely credible.

Credit Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay and director Gondry’s vision for this in part. Credit also the techie age we live in, a world where "gamma knife" electronic beams kill off brain tumor tissue and functional MRI imaging shows little parts of our brain lighting up when we’re depressed or crave cocaine. Never mind that you can’t rid the brain of old memories without destroying the capacity to make new ones. (That’s protagonist Leonard’s plight in Christopher Nolan’s highly praised film, Memento.) But what really pulls us in is the textured, believable love story. Who doesn’t know of the aggrieved lover’s wish to get the other person out of their thoughts, out of their mind. The seduction is so complete that we can feel the poignancy of Joel’s struggle in the middle of his memory erasure to stop the session, to awaken and preserve some remaining shreds of Clementine and the love they shared.

ETERNITY AND A DAY (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, 1999). THEME: DEATH & DYING; REMINISCENCE; REGRET. Bruno Gans is Alexandre, an aging writer dying of a painful cancer, who spends his final day reflecting upon his life and befriending an Albanian boy who is an illegal alien. There are numerous gorgeously filmed scenes, often the long and slow moving sort for which this director is known. (The visuals cannot be fully appreciated on a TV monitor.) Use of flashbacks is especially well done. We learn a lot about Alexandre's remoteness, his consequent regret over his inability to love or, ironically for a writer, even to know the language of love. And yet on this day he tenderly cares for his dog and reaches out time and again to help the little boy, who almost seems to run away from the aid offered him. (Cannes Palme d'Or Award winner in 1999) (In Greek - Gans spoke German and was dubbed...it's not a problem) Grade: B+ (03/02)

EVERY LITTLE THING  ( Nicolas Philibert, France, 1997)  THEME: PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL. In this play within a play, at an exclusive asylum in the Loire Valley, the patients and staff prepare for their annual outdoor summer pageant. This is a documentary reflecting present day circumstances at the hospital.  (In French) Grade: B (01/98)

EXOTICA (Atom Egoyan, Canada, 1994, 103 min.). THEMES: PATHOLOGICAL BEREAVEMENT, VOYEURISTIC SEXUAL OBSESSION. SPOILER ALERT! Francis Brown (Bruce Greenwood) has been psychologically laid waste by losses: first the murder of his pre-teen daughter, then, two months later, the accidental death of his wife in an auto accident while accompanied by his brother, further confirming Francis’s awareness that his wife and brother were having an affair. Two years have passed, and Francis remains a tortured man, brooding, tense, sad. He has developed an obsessional habit of hanging out at a strip club on the outskirts of Toronto called Exotica, where he has eyes only for Christina (Mia Kirshner), a very young, demure dancer whose routine involves dressing in a school uniform and keeping her clothes more-or-less on except for flashes of flesh.

This is a major subplot, but several others are intertwined by Egoyan, who wrote the screenplay. Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife) is the proprietress of Exotica, a place her mother started years ago. She dotes on all the dancers and tries to run an upscale, tasteful operation. Her chief assistant is Eric (Elias Koteas), a moody, rough edged, long haired young man who acts as m.c. and d.j. for the club, building up the unique virtues in his introduction of each dancer, as he attempts to stir interest in the all male audience. He was once Christina’s lover and is jealous of her intense connection with Francis, even though he understands it. Then there is Thomas (Don McKellar), a quirky gay pet store owner who smuggles illegal exotic bird eggs into the country. All of these characters become connected after Francis, who is in fact a government agent, poses as an auditor to collect financial information from Thomas that will clinch the smuggling case against him. Francis makes a deal: if Thomas will go to Exotica and seek information from Christina about her connections to Eric and others at the club, he – Francis – will alter the evidence against Thomas and thus clear him.

We know all along that Christina and Francis each fulfill some intense need the other has. It is clear enough early on that she is a substitute for his lost daughter, though we don’t get the details of this loss until late, near the end. We learn then that it was Eric and Christina, helping in a massive search of fields two years ago, who discovered Francis’s daughter’s body. We learn that Francis was actually suspected of the killing for a few days before the real killer was identified. This left Francis with an indelible sense of guilt, as if he were responsible. He tells Christina over and over that he would never hurt her, that he only wants to protect her. We also discover almost at the end that years ago Christina had been a sitter for Francis’s daughter. As if this web were not complex enough, Francis also has replaced Christina the sitter with another teenager, Tracey (a young Sarah Polley), whom he pays to “sit” at his house while he goes out to Exotica, as if his daughter were still alive and in need of supervision while he’s out.

Three kinds of men frequent strip joints. There are the swaggering minor thugs, thrill seekers and hoody types; college kids; and lonely, empty men. If the complex tangle of characters and motives in this stylized film is a bit much – which it is, at least it does tell a convincing central story of the motivations and dynamics that can operate in a case of the latter type of man, one who seeks to assuage the pain of loss and loneliness through voyeuristic sexual obsession. The issues for Francis are anything but sexual in an adult sense, but have entirely to do with matters of loss, loneliness, culpability, and substitution of stand ins for the loved ones who are gone. Grade: B. (01/05)

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, US, 2000). THEMES: OUTSIZED, UNUSUAL PERSONALITY; HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY; CHAMPION OF GAYS IN FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN CIRCLES. A memoir of former televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker's life and times. She's on screen nearly all the time in this short (80 minute) film, and we see her story from the time she met Jim Bakker in college up to the present time, when her second husband is released from federal prison, after conviction for fraud, and they are reunited after a two year hiatus. Tammy Faye, of course, is one of the reigning queens of tasteless kitsch, and she shows this to the max here, in dress, makeup, her home furnishings, frilly little dogs, and so on.

One distracting and strange aspect of the film is that each segment is introduced by two hand puppets speaking in high pitched unision some catch phrase, like "And then things got worse..." These introductions seem to mock Tammy Faye and her troubles in a rather nasty manner. Then - recalling that early in the film we learn that Tammy Faye herself loved making and performing with hand puppets, which was her first role when she and Jim launched their very first Christian TV show - it occurred to me that these puppet intro. segments in the film might very well have been her idea.

Like most written memoirs by show biz celebrities, this film certainly puts a positive spin on the Bakkers' troubles over the years. But despite the horrid glitz and the self serving slant of the movie, a Tammy Faye comes through here who is strong, resilient, impassioned and a generally good person, one who loves to sing, genuinely loves people and embraces diversity. (She was the first and possibly the only televangelist ever to openly accept gays, more recently starred on a TV talk show with a gay cohost; RuPaul Charles narrates the film.) I like Tammy Faye far more after seeing this film than I did before. Grade: B- (10/00)

EYES WIDE SHUT   (Stanley Kubrick, UK/US, 1999)  THEME: PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS, e.g., THE POWER OF FANTASY AND DREAMS.  Kubrick's last film, awaited for 13 long years, cannot help but disappoint. Based on a trivial if gothic novella from Vienna in the 20s, updated to NYC in the 90s, this is the story of a well off young couple whose 9 year marriage has not yet been tested by straying sexual interests on either side.  And then it is tested, mightily.  Tom Cruise is all smiles as a charmingly naive physician who enters a vortex of curiosity, titillation, mystery, jealousy, revenge, fear, guilt and reconciliation, after his wife, Nicole Kidman, confesses her lustful adoration of a stranger she had only glimpsed while on vacation the year before.  The idea of a physician to NY socialites in the 1990s being a sexual naif is hard to believe, as are the trappings of the orgy.  Seems like Victorian era stuff, which indeed it almost is, as the story is based on a novella written in 1926 and set in 1912. Shades of Freud are also invoked by the more fundamental theme that dreams and fantasies can have the compelling power of reality. Well, yes, but didn't we know that already?  Still, the film has an hypnotic quality, the cool precision of scenes and music that are Kubrick's trademarks. For more on this film, see my article, "Freud's Far Reach on Film." Grade: B (07/99)

FACES (John Cassavetes, US, 1968). THEMES: MARITAL FAILURE; LONELINESS; MALE HOSTILITY. Cassavetes's first indie film to break through to mainstream audiences, it won or was nominated for several awards, including several for C’s screenplay. The film features his trademark approaches: black and white cinema verité style, long takes with little (some believe too little) editing, and long closeups of the faces of his actors, most of whom are old friends from New York acting school who work for him for little or nothing, and whom he trusts to improvise much of their dialogue. The result is a fly-on-the-wall sense of witnessing real people behaving in real time. Or should I say misbehaving, for, with a two exceptions, no one behaves very well in this film. The themes are stultifying marriage, loneliness and hostility, a nastiness seen in every man except for the aging gigolo Chet (Seymour Cassel, a favorite Cassavetes actor). The other decent sort is the prostitute Jeannie (Gena Rowlands, C’s wife) to whom the disaffected husband Dicky (John Marley) turns after many rejections by his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin, like Cassel, an Oscar nominee for her supporting role here). Grade: B+ (06/00)

FAITHLESS (Liv Ullmann, Sweden, 2001).  THEMES: REMINISCENCE IN OLD AGE; MARITAL CONFLICT; GRIEF; SUICIDE.  Reflecting on a love triangle long ago, an aging director explores his grief and strives to find meaning in his past mistakes.  From a script by Ingmar Bergman who, at 81, serves notice that he is not yet through excoriating himself or us in this new chapter of his relentless scorched earth autobiographical demon exorcism. An ingeniously constructed plot, and well acted, this work shows that Bergman is still spellbinding. (In Swedish)  Grade: A- (02/01)

THE FALL OF ’55 (Seth Randal, US, 2006, 82 m.). THEMES: HOMOPHOBIA SEIZES A COMMUNITY IN STAID 1950s BOISE, IDAHO. Documentary recounting the homosexual scandal enveloping the city of Boise, Idaho, in the autumn of 1955. A local probation officer got the idea that one or more men in the town were arranging sexual contacts with several teen boys. He was brushed aside by higher ups (and eventually demoted for his troubles), but he persisted. The major newspaper in the state, The Idaho Statesman, got hold of the story and began a sensational press campaign to dramatize and exaggerate the matter. Rumors grew to suggest that the ring included many men and "hundreds" of male youths. A witch hunt of sorts unfolded over the next couple of months.

In all, 16 men were indicted, only one of whom successfully challenged the charges and was acquitted. A majority of the others, including a few prominent men in town, went to prison. Others left town, some never to return, including one of the most popular men in town, whose family ran a drive-in restaurant, and the son of a councilman, who was exposed as one of the boys who had participated. As a result, he left West Point in disgrace and killed himself the following year.

This film panders to shopworn stereotypes: homosexual men as simply predators upon the young, or such predation being the "cause" of homosexuality. There is no effort to link this story to any of the well recognized circumstances that involve anti-gay prejudices in America today. Indeed, in his recent interview for this film, Dr. Jack Butler, a psychiatrist who was brought in to advise Boise city fathers in the midst of the 1955 upheaval, states that this sort of hysteria would not occur today, implying that our culture has matured in its attitudes toward homosexuality.

Well, yes, there is some evidence to suggest that this is true. Walking around downtown Boise these days, you can see ads for an upcoming local Gay & Lesbian film festival, and a tavern not far from the state capitol states on its marquee that it is "Straight Friendly." But with all due respect for Jack Butler, who is my esteemed colleague and friend in Portland nowadays, I cannot agree with him that stigmatization of gays has eased all that much.

Nationwide, homophobic hate crimes are more common today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, even in the face of a general decline in violent crime. And anti-gay sentiment is evidenced in the widespread opposition to gay conjugal unions. Most importantly, sexual predation on teens, regardless of gender orientation, invariably, and rightly, evokes strong public outrage in any era. By not making any effort to generalize, either to the present day or to other locales, this film pigeonholes its story, isolating it in both time and place.

Beyond that, with few exceptions, this movie is poorly crafted. Monotonous, self conscious, vividly colored computer graphic images of stylized autumn leaves and fancy opening titles do little to set the stage for the somber, largely black and white, archival material that follows. Much of the film stock - scenes of the town in the 1950s – is of poor quality. Sound is also variable, occasionally not clearly audible.

The recent interviews with Dr. Butler and with Alty Travelstead, the late son of the restaurant owner who left town in 1955, are well done, really the best elements in the film. Travelstead's sense of having no home, after being uprooted as a young boy and drifting with his family from place to place, is poignantly told. By and large, though, this film is an amateurish effort. Possibly a good film could be made from this material, but it will take a more mature talent for screen writing and editing to produce a decent product. Grade: B- (Seen at the Idaho International Film Festival, 09/06)

FAR FROM HEAVEN (Todd Haynes, US, 2002). THEMES: MARITAL CRISIS BASED ON HOMOSEXUAL AND INTERRACIAL ISSUES. The kudos for this period film derive from the thoroughness of Haynes’s accomplishment in making a movie that is so amazingly well crafted to resemble a Douglas Sirk 1950s dramas (e.g, Imitation of Life, All That heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession). It has the look, the style, the story, the music and the manners of that time. Impeccably so. Stripped of these 50s Sirkian features, however, what’s left is a decent, well acted suburban psychodrama. We’ve had several of these in recent years: films like Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, or Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. Those films too have been faithful to a period (1970s, 1990s).

The themes that set the principal players on edge in Far From Heaven - homosexual and interracial intimacy – would be problematic enough in contemporary white upper middle class suburban society, but 50 years ago they would have been incendiary issues or, more correctly, issues simply not brought to the screen at all. Cathy (Julianne Moore), a well off housewife, is plunged into a severe marital crisis after she witnesses her successful husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) kissing another man. With her life spinning out of orbit, she responds to the kind support of her gardener, Raymond, a refined black man (Dennis Haysbert). A budding love unmistakably develops between these two. Moore, in the manner of those times, maintains a façade of composure and carries on, despite a perilous course that could result in the loss of both Frank and Raymond. Moore’s performance is faultless, while Quaid’s is a bit one-dimensional: generally speaking his Frank is a grump who drinks too much; but then, his plate is rather full. I was drawn most to the supporting work of Haysbert and the versatile Patricia Clarkson, who is Cathy’s best friend. Grade: B+ (01/03)

FEARLESS (Peter Weir, US, 1993). THEMES: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD); SURVIVOR GUILT; BEREAVEMENT; NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES. SPOILER ALERT! Jeff Bridges stars as Max Klein, a successful architect who is among the survivors of a commercial airliner crash in a cornfield near Bakersfield. Moments before the crash, he experiences an epiphany: his life is ending, he realizes, and this produces within him not panic but a state of sudden serene acceptance. He reassures panicky passengers and leaves his seat, next to his business partner, moving up to sit with a frightened young boy who is traveling alone. His partner is killed on impact, but Bridges, who’s uninjured, stays calm and leads several other passengers to safety before explosions erupt. In subsequent interviews survivors recall him as their savior.

The experience is transformative for Max. He feels removed from his life before the crash, distant from his family. He spends a night at a motel in L.A. and doesn’t even bother to call his wife, Laura (Isabella Rossellini), to tell her he is alive. FBI agents locate him and send him home. He chooses to fly, with no fear of the plane. Indeed, he now seems unfazed by stressors of any sort, sees no prospect of risk to himself in any circumstance: he feels invulnerable. He boldly crosses busy streets in mid-block. Even his life-threatening anaphylactic allergy to strawberries has disappeared: he can gobble them down with impunity.

Max disdains the maneuvers of a lawyer (Tom Hulce) to assure a sizable settlement for Max and for is dead partner’s family. He shows little interest in work and other routines. He’s short tempered with his son, emotionally isolated from Laura. Max now seems interested only in helping two of the other survivors: the young boy he had aided and a woman, Carla (Rosie Perez), whose infant was killed in the crash. He encounters Carla at a group trauma debriefing arranged by Dr. Perlman (John Turturro), a psychiatrist hired by the airline, who seems rather inept in his efforts to help these people, even though he claims expertise about PTSD.

Carla is especially hard to reach. She is mute, withdrawn, terribly depressed. Dr. Perlman arranges for Max to visit Carla. They end up walking into a church, and this marks the beginning of Carla opening up, over the course of many visits the couple share. Laura is understandably baffled and more than a little jealous about Max’s emotional estrangement from her and their son, while his preoccupation with Carla’s well being only seems to grow more intense with time.

Matters come to a head when Max exhibits more dangerous behaviors. In one incident, he drives a car into a brick wall with Carla in the rear seat holding a toolbox, to demonstrate how it was beyond her control to keep hold of her baby against the force of impact when the plane crashed. (This demonstration works: and there is a breakthrough in her survivor guilt.) After this, however, more cracks begin to appear in Max’s serene façade. Laura discovers in his den a series of disturbing paintings he has made suggesting death (each consists of a violent, chaotic abstract scape with a deep red vortex at its center). Max himself eventually seems to sense that he is on a dangerous path and asks Laura to “save” him.

The film ends when Max nonchalantly eats a strawberry and this time experiences one of his accustomed anaphylactic reactions, a bad one. In Laura’s arms and near death from asphyxia, he re-experiences moments from the time of the crash, when he is leading others from the plane. But now this memory is merged with an image of an intense white light at the end of the dark tunnel-like fuselage, and Max is walking slowly away, receding into the distance, toward the light. We know that if Max survives this attack, he will once more be himself; no longer a man living a dissociated life, denying his vulnerability; beyond the beatific state he has floated in for weeks, in the world yet apart from it. And we know that while he will regain much that is valuable and true of him, should he survive, at the same time he may also lose something of great value, a quality of the spirit, a sublime, transcendent element that had sustained him through a dark and terrible time.

I rank this as one of the best feature films about post-traumatic stress disorder, in a class with Ordinary People and The Sweet Hereafter. Rafael Yglesias, who adapted his own (then unpublished) novel for the screenplay, displays a keen understanding of clinical, psychodynamic and spiritual issues surrounding PTSD. Mr. Bridges is masterful as Max. His matter of fact portrayal is consistent with someone who has responded to overwhelming, life threatening stress through dissociation, splitting off his fears and encapsulating them in a virtually unconscious compartment, expressed only through his paintings and occasional, seemingly impulsive bouts of dangerous behavior. Otherwise he is serene, protected from his fears by denial, repression and isolation. Max’s withdrawal from his family and life routines is an all too common phenomenon in PTSD, and a cause of much family and occupational dysfunction.

Laura’s bewilderment is typical of the quandary spouses of trauma victims frequently experience. They feel shut out, and they are. The only clinical element missing is sleep disturbance: we should have seen some evidence of this in Max and Carla. Ms. Perez does a fine job of evoking survivor guilt and its associated emotions. The importance of a spiritual element also rings true. Frequently traditional interventions employed by clergy (confession, witnessing, meditation, expiatory acts) gain ground when added to counseling work with PTSD patients, where conventional psychotherapy strategies alone have failed. See also my article titled "Trauma and Transformation." Grades: drama: B+; clinical issues: A- (11/04)

FELICIA’S JOURNEY (Atom Egoyan UK/Canada, 1999). THEMES: ABUSE OF WOMEN; SADISTIC PERVERSION. A young Irish girl finds her way to Birmingham, England, in search of her lover. There she meets a most unusual fellow (Bob Hoskins) who is a gourmet chef and also has a less savory habit of initially befriending women in need before moving on to abuse them. With Arsinee Kahnjian as his famous TV Chef mother, "Gala." Grade: B (12/99)

FIGHT CLUB (David Fincher, US, 1999). THEMES: PARODY OF SELF-HELP GROUPS; ANTI-CORPORATE SENTIMENTS; (JUNGIAN) SHADOW SIDE OF HUMAN NATURE; TERRORISM; CLUSTER B PERSONALITY DISORDER. Edward Norton plays a milquetoast corporate lackey, earning all the money he can in order to buy all the latest expensive baubles of middle class life. On a flight he is attracted to a rough and tumble free spirit type, played by Brad Pitt, and seeks him out again after his condo is destroyed in an explosion. The two go on to create a clandestine men's club where the guys pair off and conduct serious fights with each other. This activity seems to be life-inspiring in a way that makes other self-help efforts pale. But club activities spread to terrorist acts against the established order, especially enterprises related to consumerism, like credit card companies. Norton's character gets seriously worried by this turn of events but can't seem to influence Pitt's character to stop. Then things get weird. Helena Bonham Carter plays the love interest.

There's a lot that is very funny in this movie, like the parody of self-help groups at the start. Carter is terrific in her most unconventional role to date as a determinedly neurotic wild woman, and Pitt is also excellent in his animal physicality. Unfortunately Norton's weak slip of a character requires him to keep his own visceral talent too much under wraps. Although the pace is fast and the sheer attention-grabbing entertainment value of this film runs high, the viewing experience ultimately falls short of full satisfaction for two reasons: first, a plot twist that, unlike that in Sixth Sense, is simply too extreme to sustain credibility, instead discrediting much of what had come earlier in the film. The second problem is preachiness: Pitt's character endlessly sermonizes on the tyranny of corporation-orchestrated consumer culture and the challenge to each individual to find the courage and the violence necessary to break free (even if this leads to one's own death). This bit of urban guerrilla philosophy is as old as it is overblown here. Grade: B+ (12/99)

FIVE TIMES TWO (5 X 2) (Francois Ozon, France, 2004, 90 min.). THEME: MARITAL FAILURE. Say what you will about French director Francois Ozon, he has a real knack for finding unconventionally beautiful, mystifying women, placing them at the center of his movies, and filming them unsparingly. His best works that I have seen are his two collaborations with Charlotte Rampling, who is more alluring and delightfully multifacted in middle age than she was when young (Under the Sand and Swimming Pool). In Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, who plays Marion in 5 X 2, he has found another woman who shares in common with Ms. Rampling the capacity to convey a rich complexity of attitudes, motives and moods. These women keep us guessing.

Ms. Bruni-Tedeschi (a native of Turin, Italy, who has had a very busy film acting career in France over the past 20 years) is by conventional standards somewhat homely, even slightly equestrian in facial features, and she certainly does not have the anorexic stick figure of American pop ideals. But she commands the screen with her frequent demeanor of slight puzzlement, bemused more often than she seems to be at ease or enjoying herself, though she can express these states as well. She is hauntingly, mysteriously beautiful, and Ozon gives her the picture, just as he gave the other two to Ms. Rampling. (Ozon’s 8 Women, to which most critics were generous in giving mildly positive reviews, was a case of Ozon overdosing on his pet film formula: giving a film away not to one but eight beauties, most of whom, incidentally, proved surprisingly limited in their range of entertainment skills. Most couldn’t dance or carry a tune or do anything much except look gorgeous and talk small talk with a gravitas that only the French can muster with a straight face.)

There isn’t much else besides Ms. Bruni-Tedeschi to commend in this film. It is the story of the arc of a love relationship, crisply structured in five segments that move backward in time from the present. The segments in the order they appear in the film are about: divorce, disenchantment, the birth of the couple’s one child, marriage, and their initial romantic encounter. The husband Gilles (Stephane Freiss, who played the doofus husband in the goofy film, Le Grand Rolé) is a self centered man, incapable of extending himself in a genuinely loving manner; his limitations are most apparent when he avoids being by Marion’s side during a crisis around the complicated birth of their son. And yet Gilles seems to love his son tenderly. Marion’s stoical acceptance that their marriage cannot work out is certainly easy to sympathize with, though her own conduct is at times puzzling, especially her wedding night escapade and her willingness to go with Gilles directly from the divorce lawyer's office to bed at a hotel.

While this film is competently made, the material it churns through is all too familiar, the stuff of simple domestic pathos we have all experienced for ourselves, heard about from loved ones, or seen on the screen a hundred times before. No new ideas or perspectives emerge here. As film friend Marty Kinsella says, if you put the five segments of this film in chronological order, rather than reverse order, it would be a bore. There’s only one reason to see this film, and that is the performance of its female lead. And that is - though just barely - reason enough. (In French, English & Italian) Grade: B- (02/05)

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (Clint Eastwood, US, 2006, 132 m.). THEME: COMBAT-RELATED POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. SPOILER ALERT! Clint Eastwood’s new WW II docudrama, Flags of Our Fathers, begins grippingly in the midst of a nocturnal battle. On a denuded landscape, a solitary combatant stares blankly at us, his face transfixed with shock. We’re on Iwo Jima, and this is John "Doc" Bradley, a Navy medic assigned to a Marine infantry company. Or is this Doc Bradley’s combat flashback sometime in the future?

We move forward in time - which happens often in this film, as it interlaces combat scenes with fragments of subsequent history down to the present day - and meet Doc Bradley’s son, James. He grew up knowing that his father, a prosperous mortician, had been a corpsman during WW II and was one of the six men who planted an American flag atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, an act immortalized in an almost accidental photo by Joe Rosenthal that became one of the most famous pictures in the history of photojournalism.

The elder Bradley was celebrated as a hero, awarded the Navy Cross, and repatriated to the U.S., where he took part in a barnstorming tour of the country to promote war bond sales, along with the two other flag raisers who had survived. Thereafter, Bradley never spoke of his combat experiences, except for a single conversation with his wife of 47 years, on their first date, in 1946, and in one journalistic interview, in 1985. John Bradley died early in 1994, at the age of 70. Whereupon James - knowing there had been controversy about the flag raising, and also aware that his father had suffered from war-related nightmares and spells when he would become agitated and occasionally misidentify familiar people - resolved to discover the full story of his father’s time on Iwo Jima.

We return to the events of 1945 and get acquainted with the main characters - young Bradley and several Marines - as they kill time playing cards and joshing each other aboard a troop ship, part of a huge armada closing in on the tiny island fortress. The ensuing invasion is spectacular: hundreds of ships stretching to the horizon; the mass landing of troops and materiel. Then we move up close, to small scale battle encounters and more grueling images as Marines edge up Mount Suribachi, at immense cost (Ira Hayes, another flag raiser who accompanied Bradley on tour, later said that only 27 of 250 men in their company survived the month long invasion). Next we witness reenactments of the first flag raising and the second - the one Rosenthal photographed - on the morning the Marines won control of the mountain.

The war bond tour that follows, featuring Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Hayes (Adam Beach) and the third surviving flag raiser, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), is in itself a deeply ironic study of the exploitation of war heroes. Ultimately we witness the separate fates of these three men: only Bradley lived a relatively long and successful life. Hayes died of alcoholism at 32. Gagnon worked at menial jobs, also became alcoholic, and died at 54.

The conflation of truth, faulty recollections, bad intelligence and disinformation that makes up the "fog" of every war is laid bare here, well wrought in the central parable of this film: competing versions of the "facts" of the Iwo Jima flag raising itself. What's the truth here, anyway? Questions about heroism, sometimes addressed obliquely but never didactically, include: What makes a hero? What motivates combatants to fight with such seeming courage? What is the relationship of death and survival to heroism? Who is it that needs heroes? Or needs to pretend to be one? How fleeting is the fame of "yesterday’s" heroes? And what are the long term costs of heroism, to the individual and to society?

In Flags we are repeatedly confronted by the intense anguish of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For Ira Hayes this mainly consists of extreme survivor guilt, depression, social dysfunction, and alcohol abuse to temporarily assuage his psychic pain. Doc Bradley has lifelong combat re-experiencing symptoms (i.e., flashbacks, nightmares, hints of dissociative fugues), guilt about not being able to save some of his buddies and for killing an enemy soldier when face to face, as well as the inability to share combat experiences with loved ones.

We see that some veterans, like Hayes, never surmount their symptoms, while even "well adjusted" former combatants, like Bradley, can experience more prominent symptoms in later life, often triggered by failing health or other losses. (Gagnon, sheltered from combat, apparently did not suffer from an acute stress disorder and developed drinking problems only later in life.)

In the case of Hayes, a Pima Indian, some viewers might mistakenly think that Native American combat survivors with PTSD are especially vulnerable to alcoholism, i.e., the stereotype of the "drunken Indian." In fact, alcoholism and drug dependence are equal opportunity afflictions, common in the aftermath of combat-related PTSD, irrespective of race or ethnicity.

The casting of relatively unknown actors in the key roles of Bradley, Hayes and Gagnon - and in most of the small roles as well - is both an asset (we are more inclined to see these men as soldiers, not actors) and a liability (so many anonymous faces makes for confusion about who’s who - it took me more than half the film to get everyone’s identities sorted out). Credit Eastwood’s direction for the fact that most of the performances are very good.

Flags evoked a deepening melancholy within me that came to a head when Doc Bradley’s dies late in the film. At the end, I wept openly, something I rarely do watching movies. I was crying for the loss of my father. For the loss of life and the psychological and physical crippling of survivors caused by wars. And for other losses of perhaps equal gravity: the corruption of innocence and of morality in the wake of war; the waste of vast resources that might have been spent on more redeeming social or environmental projects.

Flags deserves to be included in the first rank of movies that examine the psychosocial costs of war (particularly for its emphasis on long-lasting sequelae of war trauma), along with All Quiet on the Western Front and Mrs. Dalloway (the subplot about the “shell shocked” soldier, Septimus Smith) (both about WW I); The Best Years of Our Lives and Thin Red Line (WW II); Coming Home and The Deer Hunter (Vietnam); and the Danish film, Brothers (Brødre), about a NATO peacekeeper forced by his captors to kill a comrade (post 9/11 Afghan war). Grade: A- (10/06)

FLESH AND BONE (Steve Kloves, US, 1993). THEMES: AVOIDANT PERSONALITY; INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY CONFLICT. Here’s a nifty sleeper. Superb acting by all four principals and a stellar screenplay grace this tale of payback for evil in a tough, taut film set in the dusty hardscrabble Texas flatlands. Dennis Quaid plays a man weighed down with a burden of despair he has carried all his adult life, a joyless loner making his rounds, tending to vending machines in a score of small, forlorn towns. Along the way he meets a reckless woman (Meg Ryan) who is down on her marital luck. They also encounter a tough young psychopathic woman who steals from everyone, even the dead (Gwyneth Paltrow in her first substantial screen role). She turns out to be partnered with Quaid’s estranged father, an aging, nomadic thief and worse (James Caan). We learn in the very first scenes of the film the basis of Quaid’s later despondency. But the story unfolds some 30 years later in a series of unexpected turns. The dialogue is always crisp, fresh, real, devoid of clichés. The film is blunt and unsentimental. These are entirely believable people living out a terrible, oddly twisted, fateful drama of justice, redemption and the limits of these forces. Grade: A- (10/02)

FOLLOWING (Christopher Nolan, UK, 1999). THEME: VOYEURISM. This was the first feature film created by Nolan, who more recently wrote and directed the cult hit Memento. Nolan wrote and directed this brief (70 min) film, and also shot it, largely using a hand held camera, in a grainy black and white. The central character is "Bill," a 20-something unemployed would-be writer (Jeremy Theobald, who also co-produced with Nolan), who follows strangers around London, possibly - as he tells us - because it might supply material for writing, but more likely because of a twisted voyeuristic obsession. With two films to compare, certain patterns about Nolan's work begin to emerge. He is interested in lowlifes.

Nolan is especially intrigued with the power of film to manipulate time. Time contrivances were at the heart of Memento, in which the film opens in the present, then moves backward stepwise in overlapping flashback segments, gradually revealing the characters and the course of events that led to action in the first scenes. In Following, Nolan did the opposite: he begins at the beginning when Bill first starts to follow people, although his narration over the visuals is retrospective. We then get various flash forwards: Bill well groomed in a suit, rather than sleazy looking with a scraggly goatee; Bill, still in his suit, but with bruises and cuts on his face. Other characters weave into his experience: the slick burglar whom Bill has been following (Alex Haw); a glamorous woman whose flat the two burglarize; an older man seen interviewing Bill. Gradually the story between these flash forwards fills in, giving the flashes context.

In both films Nolan is also interested in the blurry boundary between innocence and guilt, or better put, the possibility that he who professes innocence may in fact be guilty. There is a raw quality to Following, partly attributable to low budget product and partly intended. The characters in this film are raw people. They are callous and manipulative and do bad things to one another. Bill may be the most innocent among them: certainly he is as fearful as he is titillated by his own increasingly nefarious and dangerous acts. But if, in the end, it seems that Bill himself is the person who has most been taken advantage of, still, along the way, he has learned to steal, cheat and do considerable violence to others. Quite an ingenious first film. Grade: B- (12/01)

FRANCES (Graeme Clifford, US, 1982). THEMES: COMMITMENT AND PUBLIC HOSPITAL (MIS)TREATMENT IN 1940s-50s. This is a mediocre biopic of the tragic life of actress Frances Farmer. The film does feature a career-making, Oscar-nominated performance in the title role by Jessica Lange and addresses several significant mental health issues. The biographical account here is accurate in many respects, but way off in others (the most glaring example is the entirely fictional character, Harry York, played by Sam Shepard, an admirer, an aid in various escapes, and occasionally a lover of Frances’s). Perhaps the most useful thing I can do here is to summarize an accurate account of Farmer's life and problems. She was born in Seattle in 1913, won a national essay contest at 16, studied drama at U. Washington, won a trip to Russia, and in 1935, at age 23, came under contract following a screen test at Paramount Studios. Over the next 6 years, she made 18 pictures, starring in several, and appeared in 3 Broadway plays, 30 major radio presentations and 7 summer stock theater companies. She had swiftly traversed from new starlet to major dramatic talent. She married the actor Leif Erickson in 1936.

Ms. Farmer had a maverick temperament: she resisted conforming to expectations for young contract players in Hollywood, and later felt betrayed by Clifford Odets after performing in his 1937 Broadway hit, “Golden Boy,” and sharing their brief affair. She had wished to remain a stage actress but was forced to return to Hollywood when the studio chief brought various pressures to bear. She began to use alcohol and amphetamines (benzedrine) excessively, and her behavior became more erratic and marked by disruptive angry displays. Her marriage to Erickson ended. She violated probation rules after an arrest for driving in a dim-out zone at night (it was wartime, in 1942) and raised a ruckus in court, leading to psychiatric evaluation. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive (though her mood swings could easily have been caused by substance abuse, this association was not widely appreciated in that era), and wound up in 1943 in a private mental hospital for the film industry, where she received 90 insulin coma treatments. She escaped in 1944 and returned to her family home in Washington. But in 1945, following further erratic behavior, her mother had her committed to the Western State Hospital at Steilecoom. ECT and hydrotherapy followed. She seemed better, was discharged, but was readmitted in 1945 by her mother, who had been appointed her guardian.

This time she endured a five year commitment, more ECT, repeated sexual abuse by orderlies and soldiers, who were allowed into the women’s wards for sex for a price. She was also a subject in several early antipsychotic drug trials. Whether she had a peri-orbital partial frontal lobotomy during this admission is conjectural. It is known that the leading proponent of this procedure, Dr. Walter Freeman, visited the hospital, perhaps in 1948, and had a private 1:1 session with Ms. Farmer while there. Hospital staff passed rumors that Freeman had performed a lobotomy during this unwitnessed meeting, but this has never been adequately verified. (Actually, a majority of patients subjected to the peri-orbital partial leucotomy procedure suffered sustained and obvious mental impairment and personality change, which eventually led to abandonment of the method. It is difficult for me to reconcile Ms. Farmer’s ability to host a TV show years later with the notion of her having undergone such a procedure.)

She was released from the hospital in 1950, soon remarried, spent much of the next six years aiding her aging parents (her mother died in 1955, her father the following year), and also resumed excessive alcohol use. She worked at menial jobs and was discovered by a reporter clerking in a hotel. 1958 was a pivotal year for Ms. Farmer. She divorced, remarried a third husband, and was selected to appear on Ralph Edwards’s TV show, “This is Your Life” (the only person ever to appear on the show who knew in advance she had been selected, she had in fact asked to appear in order to help rebuild her lurid reputation). On the Edwards program, she seemed emotionally neutral and serene, but perhaps less quick witted than in the past. Although some wonder if this reflected the effects of the extreme physical treatments she had sustained, it is also possilbe that her alcohol abuse affected her conduct.

She also was given a small role in a 1958 Hollywood film, her last (a dreadful thing called The Party Crashers), and that same year she landed a good job hosting a daily TV variety/talk show in Indianapolis, Indiana, “Frances Farmer Presents.” She and her new spouse soon became estranged and never reconciled. She continued to host the TV program for six years, until 1964. One account says that her drinking resulted in her being fired at that point. Accounts vary about her last years. One source said she died destitute, her spirit broken. But another said she lived her final days in “contented obscurity,” within a circle of friends in Indiana. She died of esophageal cancer at age 56 in 1970.

The screenplay strongly invites the inference that Ms. Farmer did not suffer from a serious mental disorder, at least not one that was persistent to the degree that extreme measures for treating intractable psychosis were justified. Erratic behavior, lack of punctuality, frequent disappearances, and hostile tirades were common. But these could be attributable to substance abuse or an unstable ("borderline") personality. The case is also made in the film that Frances and her mother, Lillian (ably played by Kim Stanley) were locked in a severe running conflict about ambition. Lillian is portrayed as a brilliant and forceful woman constrained from fulfilling her personal ambitions for achievement, who instead attempts to live out her personal vision vicariously through Frances. It becomes mother’s need to have Frances return to Hollywood, after Frances has (no doubt wisely) decided that such a return might put her once again amid stresses that could well lead to relapse into substance abuse and emotional instability. They battle over this, and mother interprets Frances’s belligerent refusal to consider restarting her career as a sign of relapse into mental illness. This leads to Frances's final prolonged and highly destructive period of incarceration. We do not know to what extent there is a factual basis for this part of the story.

The film illustrates the power of relatives and mental health professionals in that era to arrange long periods of commitment for patients on tenuous clinical grounds, the lack of safeguards in applying extreme physical treatments, and the horrid conditions in public facilities at that time. The film demonstrates why reform in the commitment laws was necessary as well as the need to protect patients from unnecessary application of more hazardous treatments. Today ECT is administered far less often, more safely, its use is based upon more accurate diagnosis, and in many locales independent pre-treatment review (“second opinion”) is required. Neurosurgical procedures for behavior disorders employ precise, stereotactic microsurgical methods and are now limited by and large to rare cases of uncontrollable obsessive compulsive disorder.

In terms of cinematic values, this film plods along under the severe weight of predictable melodrama. The first hour is an unremarkable Hollywood story: quirky, spirited young woman goes to Hollywood to seek fame and is beaten down by the system. Ho Hum. The second hour follows Ms. Farmer’s descent into psychiatric Hell. Something viewers had seen beginning in the late 40s with The Snake Pit, then Shock Corridor in 1963, and so on. The hospital scenes near the end in Frances are certainly among the most lurid Hollywood has produced. The purpose and place of the fictional character Harry York in the film narrative is never clear. The scenes surrounding the alleged lobotomy are fictionalized for no reason other than to exaggerate Ms. Farmer’s victimization, which is clear enough without the factually flawed lobotomy scenes. I cannot recommend this film on dramatic grounds, though it is worth watching for its grimly accurate account of the wretched problems plaguing public hospital psychiatry at mid-20th century. And Ms. Lange’s turn as Frances is outstanding. Grade: dramatic values, structure and script, C; acting: A-; psychiatric issues, B (10/04)

FUNNY BONES (Peter Chelsom, UK, 1995). Oliver Platt and English physical comedian Lee Evans are half brothers who are opposites in this extraordinary exploration of the nature of comedy. A deadly serious and outrageously funny film, one that plumbs the darker ("black") aspects of humor, with wonderful turns by Leslie Caron, Jerry Lewis and an army of very engaging vaudeville and circus style entertainers. For more, see my article, "The Anatomy of Comedy." Grade: A (06/99)

THE GAMBLER  (Karel Reisz, US, 1974).  THEME: PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLING.  There aren’t many films about pathological gamblers, and even the best of them can be rather tedious to watch, like films about heroin addicts or hard porn.  Your basic script?  Gambler loses money he cannot afford, then gets into a spiral of ever increasing trouble – marked by more gambling and frantic efforts to borrow or steal money  - trying to keep a step ahead of his creditors, who are sometimes pretty nasty folks.  Here James Caan, as gambling-addicted college professor Alex Freed, displays several features often described for these sorts.  For one thing, he has a sense of omnipotence.  “I’ve got magic powers,” Alex says at one point.  “I’m scorching.  I’m hot as a pistol.”  A bit later, when one of his rare winning streaks is challenged, he protests, saying  “I’m blessed.”  And so he is, for a short while.  The quest for excitement is often a component described by gamblers.  Alex says “I like the threat of losing.  I love to win.  But if all my bets were safe ones, there wouldn’t be any ‘juice.’ ”  The film ends as Alex transfers his danger-seeking from the game tables into a back alley encounter with a knife wielding pimp. For more on this and other films about gamblers, see my article, "Gamblers on Screen: Just a Few Worth Betting On." Grade: B-  (portrayal of pathological gambler by Caan: A-) (08/03)

GARDEN STATE (Zach Braff, US, 2004). THEME: PSYCHIATRIST'S FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS. Fresh, tender, quirky and genuine, the adjectives just want to pour forth to describe this marvelous romantic comedy/coming-of-age story. First time writer-director Braff also stars as Andrew, a 25 year old, marginally employed actor in LA who returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. He hasn’t been around his old friends or seen much of his father since he was sent off to boarding school at 16. Several disparate forces move Andrew now to rethink his life. The film concerns these developments that will reshape his future. The first, of course, is the death of Andrew’s mother. We never meet her but learn that she had been rendered paraplegic years earlier, when she fell in the kitchen, after being pushed by an angry 9 year old Andrew. Plagued by poorly controlled emotions after that (what kid wouldn’t be?), Andrew was placed on medications to blunt his moods by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm, in a minor role), and had remained emotionally numbed by meds for the past 15 years. He was dispatched to boarding school for the same reason, we also learn, to decompress the emotional angst in the family household. Amazingly, we are informed of Andrew’s past without resort to a single flashback.

Dissatisfied with the course of his career and life in LA, Andrew decides to stop taking his mood stabilizing medication upon learning of his mother’s death. Back in the suburb where he grew up, reunions with old chums now contribute to Andrew’s unfolding self reappraisal. More importantly, he meets Samantha – Sam (Natalie Portman), an inquisitive young woman who seems to care about and accept him from the getgo. In the end it is the budding romance with Sam that catalyses Andrew’s resolve to change his life. But this could not have occurred without him freeing himself of the enormous burden of guilt for causing his mother’s paralysis, a burden only made worse by his father’s misguided “treatment” of Andrew’s non-existent mood disorder and his virtual banishment from the family. He confronts his father about these matters in one of the film’s more moving scenes.

Among several reasons why this film works so well, perhaps the most important is the lack of schmaltz. There is not a single note of over-the-top melodrama or pathos here. No shouting or screaming. We are never insulted by any belaboring of the obvious psychological nuances in play. Braff writes with respect for the intelligence of his audience. Many little scenes and plot twists delight because they are unexpected gifts. The off key pop solo sung by Andrew’s aunt at Mother’s funeral. Various people living in odd circumstances. One old buddy got rich selling his invention of soundless Velcro and now trundles down the corridors of his unfurnished McMansion in a golf cart. Another buddy, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), sells jewelry he acquires in a highly unusual manner. Braff also writes simple yet refreshing dialogue, with plenty of offbeat humor, yet none of it is strained, nothing is played self-consciously for laughs.

Braff himself has a warm, easy-to-watch screen presence. He can say nothing during the lull in a conversation, while the camera remains focused on his face, and it feels right. Portman and Sarsgaard are also genuine, each wonderfully relaxed in their roles. Production design is superb: details in every scene are arranged well, and the photography, by Lawrence Sher, is - like the story and the acting – unpretentious, never distracting, tricky or cute. This film never seems to manipulate us; instead it engages us, arouses our curiosity and amusement, bids us gently to care about Andrew and Sam and even Mark, leaving us entertained in the best sense. This movie is as confident, as secure in itself, as comforting, as a well worn pair of house slippers or your favorite reading chair. A splendid film. Grade: A- (09/04)

GEORGIA  (Ulu Grosbard, US, 1995).  THEME: DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a skinny, raunchy, hyperkinetic grunge singer strung out on dope and alcohol whose failing life stands in stark contrast to her older sister’s success as a singer.  For more on this film, see my article, "Good to the Last Drop." Grade:  B+ (1996)

THE GIN GAME (Arvin Brown, US, 2003).   THEME:  OLDER ADULTS STRUGGLING TO ADAPT TO LIFE IN A NURSING HOME.  Fonsia Dorsey (Mary Tyler Moore) and Weller Martin (Dick Van Dyke) are two older adults whose paths cross in a second rate nursing home for people dependent on Medicaid.  Amidst a group of residents generally more dysfunctional than themselves, these two proud people get acquainted, after a fashion, over gin rummy games.  Neither is demented and so each retains the capacity to reflect on their own lives and perpetrate whatever evasions, conceits, and self flattering narratives they choose.  But their gin games turn more embittered when Fonsia consistently beats Weller, the self styled master player, and he doesn’t like it one bit.  Weller has a vile temper and provokes Fonsia, who in turn takes off her wraps of primness and gets in a few verbal wallops in return.  Their bitterness is engendered not only by past disappointments in life that they have sustained, but also by the sad circumstances of their present lot in life, waiting to grow old and feeble in the faux coziness of the nursing home.   Van Dyke’s character is quite consistent throughout.  He’s a curmudgeon with a pathological penchant for losing control of his anger.  Moore’s character changes in ways that don’t seem as believable.  Her swearing near the end seems way off the mark, not in keeping with her controlled, Presbyterian persona, however credible her longstanding resentments might be.  But both of these venerable stars offer energetic, absorbing turns.  Van Dyke, early on, is as funny as he ever was.  D. L. Coburn adapted his stage play in this 90 minute production for PBS that premiered on May 4, 2003. VHS/DVD copies are available from PBS.  Grade:  B (05/03)

Add on The Gin Game:  Psychoanalyst Eric Erikson said that the primary developmental task of old age was to face up to potential despair by confronting one's regrets and disappointments and finding a means to achieving peace of mind, what he termed "ego integrity," through self forgiveness and letting go of old grievances toward others.  Gerontologist Robert Butler spoke of the importance of "life review" in old age - recounting the narrative of one's own life and through this review accomplishing the tasks Erikson set forth.  The two protagonists in this drama have had many negative life experiences and are stuck in their negative memories and feelings about the past.  A better residential care setting might offer them a professionally guided experience in life review and the working through of old hurts and regrets.  All too often, in meager facilities such as the one where these people live, such professional assistance is unfortunately lacking. 

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (James Mangold, US, 1999).  THEMES: INPATIENT TREATMENT; ADOLESCENT PERSONALITY DISORDERS AND DEPRESSION.  An authentic portrayal of life on a private adolescent psychiatric ward in the late 1960s, featuring Winona Ryder (thin, pale, depressed and self destructive) and Angelina Jolie (sexy, hypomanic, borderline personality disorder). They and the other patients try to cobble together some semblance of normal adolescent experience amidst the bizarreness of the hospital milieu.  For more on this film, see my article titled "Psychiatry Sixties Style, Interrupted."  Grades: (dramatic grounds): B; (clinical authenticity): A- (01/00)

GIRL ON THE BRIDGE (Patrice Leconte, France, 2000). THEMES: SUICIDE; MUTUALLY SUSTAINING LOVE RELATIONSHIP. SPOILER ALERT! Wonderful fable about love, luck, life and death. It's the latest variation on the story of the world-weary tramp who meets the gamin, a film theme made famous by Charlie Chaplin. This version is ingenious and spellbinding. Daniel Auteuil is Gabor, a down and out circus knife thrower who contemplates suicide. At the side of a bridge where he might jump, he meets Adele (Vanessa Paradis), a young nymph whose impulsive infatuations have led her to one heartbreak after another and who is also on the verge of jumping. Buoyed by her vitality and beauty, Gabor encourages Adele to team up with him, and suddenly their mutual fortunes turn positive. They find lucrative venues for their act, and through telepathy Gabor guides Adele to win repeatedly at roulette. Their knife throwing act becomes highly eroticized for them both, but Adele keeps straying to other men for sex, and the pair finally part ways. Slowly Adele comes to realize that she was more fulfilled with Gabor than with the others, and she begins to search for him, finding him in despair, just in time, in Istanbul. Beautifully photographed in black and white, with many wonderful camera angles. Very funny. Superb performances by Paradis, the captivating gamin, and by Auteuil, whose subtlest facial movements and eyes can suggest deep melancholy or desire or both at once (Auteuil won best actor honors at Cannes 99 for this role). (In French) Grade: A (08/00)

THE GLEANERS AND I (Agnes Varda, France, 2000). THEMES: LIFE AT MARGINS OF SOCIETY; ETHICS OF REDUCING WASTE; AGING GRACEFULLY. Ms. Varda, now in her 70s, has been making films for half a century. In this gently provocative film, a unique road movie, she leads us on a tour through Franceto document contemporary gleaning, defined technically as harvesting leftover produce that comes from sprouts, i.e., from the ground (as opposed to picking, which applies to produce that hangs from trees, bushes or vines). Varda narrates the entire film and begins by showing us Millet's famous painting (and ends the film with another, showing gleaners running from an oncoming storm). She takes us from potato fields to urban dumpsters and introduces us to people who sustain themselves with food from these sources. We learn, among other things, that potatoes above a certain size, and those that are irregular like the heart shapes that fascinate Varda, are rejected and dumped back into the fields. Unfortunately, few who desperately need such gleanings live close to the fields or even know that ton after ton of good food is to be found there. We meet a man that Varda felt was one of the most impressive characters she encountered on this unusual tour. Living in a rent controlled highrise, he has exclusively lived on dumpster food and discarded vegetables for ten years. He is a self-taught expert on nutrition. He has never been made ill from his diet of gleanings. He scavenges food not because poverty forces him, but because he deplores waste. It is an ethical proposition for him.

Varda expands the idea of gleaning to include many other forms. She takes us to a town where the local government prints maps marked with drop off points where anyone can leave furniture and other articles they wish to discard. We follow a fellow who makes his living by cruising these sites regularly for items to recycle and sell. We visit artists who create assemblages from found (gleaned) artifacts and visit an old stonemason who has created vast structures like the Watts Towers composed of stones, dolls and much else. Varda goes further, suggesting that most of us approach the acquisition of new information as gleaners. And she shows us a suitcase full of mementos from a trip she took to Japan to demonstrate that we even glean the manifestations of other cultures for our benefit by such collecting. She introduces us to lawyers and judges who explore French laws that govern gleaning and the ownership of discarded goods. And, of course, we inevitably meet representatives of farms, vineyards and corporations that forbid gleaning. One supermarket invited retaliation from street youths for spraying food discards with bleach to avert gleaning from their dumpsters (the kids were making too big a mess back there, the manager tells us).

Along the way Varda occasionally meanders into her preoccupations with aging. She proudly shows off her new, lightweight digital video camera and tells us only half jokingly that it is a boon to her narcissism. “See,” she says, “I can hold this camera with my right hand and photograph my left.” And so we are treated to shots of her combing her hair, which is thinning, and shots of her left hand as she wistfully discusses how the skin looks so different now than when she was young that it is like some “unknown animal” to her. She can be suddenly playful. Riding along a freeway, passing freight trucks, she shoots through the fingers of her left hand as they form a circle of steadily decreasing diameter. We see a truck in the hole framed by her fingers and then she closes her hand as if she has captured the truck. Near the end she gleans a discarded clock with no hands on a clear lucite support, and shoots her own smiling elfin face gliding across the frames behind the clock as she says "A clock with no hands is my kind of thing." By the end, we have seen how poverty, ethical principle and custom all can motivate the search for leftovers. Varda finds dignity in people everywhere. This lovely subtle film, never didactic, schools us aplenty but does so with grace and good humor. (In French) Grade: B+ (02/01)

THE GOOD GIRL (Miguel Arteta, US, 2002).  THEMES: MARITAL CONFLICT, INFIDELITY; MARIJUANA DEPENDENCE.  This film has been classified by some critics as a romantic comedy.  Nonsense.  Despite a few laughs, it’s a romantic tragedy.  It’s a story of average people in a typical small American town, whose emotionally impoverished lives are managed through such brilliant strategies as denial, indifference or suppressed desperation.  Under such circumstances, various deficits - perhaps acting in combination - prevent folks from making constructive life decisions; the choices they do make (in an effort to accept the status quo or change it) often aren’t very intelligent.  The deficit could be a problem of limited experience - a lack of worldliness, or perhaps lack of imagination, or lack of education, even lack of sufficient I.Q. points.  A better title for this film might have been ‘The Dumb Girl.’  Justine (Jennifer Aniston) is 30 and married to Phil (John C. Reilly), a dumb guy.  They live a dumb life.  She clerks.  He paints houses and gets stoned every night.  They can’t seem to have kids, though one must suspend judgment and presume that they know the requisite method.  Justine is insightful enough to know they live a dumb life.  Phil has no clue – he copes with life by escape into pot. 

Justine unwisely permits herself to become involved with a new clerk at the store (Jake Gyllenhaal), a shy, troubled young fellow.  His sense of himself is clearly signaled by the fact that he goes by the alias of ‘Holden’ after Salinger’s character, who is his hero - a red flag if there ever was one, but then you have to have read the book, and  I doubt Justine had done so.  He aspires to be a writer and creates morbid short stories that all concern a kid suspiciously like him.   He’s an obsessive misfit whose only normal function is a keen sex drive.  He is badly in need of psychiatric care and completely unqualified for an affair with an older woman.  Great choice, Justine.  But then pickings are slim in their town.  Inevitably, things get very complicated.  I won’t spoil it all by discussing the resolution of the dilemma, except to say that it is consistent with what has come before; it is believable.  Grade: B (04/03)

GOOD WILL HUNTING  (Gus Van Sant, US, 1997)  THEMES: PSYCHOTHERAPY RELATIONSHIP; THERAPIST AT WORK; ETHICAL AND BOUNDARY ISSUES IN THERAPY; ADOLESCENT PERSONALITY & CONDUCT DISORDERS. SPOILER ALERT! Trivia Quiz Time, folks. Who’s the only actor or actress to ever receive an Oscar for playing a psychotherapist? Right! It’s Robin Williams, Best Supporting Actor in 1998, for his role in this movie as Sean Maguire, a psychotherapist who teaches clinical psychology at a nondescript Boston college. As a favor to an old friend, a math professor at MIT, Maguire agrees to treat the impossibly defensive boy math genius and world class smartass, Will Hunting. But wait, I’m getting ahead of the story here.

Hunting (Matt Damon), age 20, works as a janitor in the math building at MIT. He surreptitiously solves near impossible math problems left up on blackboards to challenge students in an advanced class taught by Fields Medal winning professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård). Prof. Lambeau finally catches Hunting in the act one day, and tries unsuccessfully to engage the young man. Hunting has had a rough life: orphaned early, he passed through several foster homes where he was badly abused physically. In adolescence he has accumulated an impressive arrest record for multiple assaults, grand theft auto, and impersonating a police officer, among other raps. He has stayed out of jail by defending himself in court, where he displays a withering command of pertinent case law (he has a photographic memory). His janitor’s job was arranged by his probation officer.

Hunting grew up in the rough and tumble Irish area of south Boston known as “Southy.” For fun, he cruises with his buddies (who include characters played by the Affleck brothers, Ben and Casey), drinking beer, hitting on girls, picking fights. One night at a bar in Cambridge he meets Skylar (Minnie Driver), a trust fund child who attends Harvard and will soon head for medical school in California. They click. But soon, in a street brawl with his buddies, Will is once again arrested and given a 6-month jail sentence by a judge who brushes aside Hunting’s jailhouse lawyer defense. Prof. Lambeau intercedes, convincing the judge to suspend the sentence if Hunting will agree to take part in a math tutorial and psychotherapy. As the tutorial moves along, it becomes clear that Hunting is a once-in-a-generation genius of Einsteinian dimension who can solve problems better than anyone on the MIT faculty, including Lambeau. But as a therapy patient, he’s worse than a dud. Lambeau shops Will to five therapists he knows (one cameo is played by George Plimpton), but Will on every occasion presents himself as outrageous, insolent and untreatable. Finally Lambeau turns to an old chum from school days, Maguire, who agrees to see Hunting, and the real adventures in this film begin.

The adventures I refer to occur in the process of psychotherapy encounters between Maguire and Hunting. Make no mistake, Maguire is not a traditional therapist. He may understand and use psychodynamics, but he eschews the indirect methods of psychoanalysis in his work. He’s one of the newer wave of therapists who believe in more direct, active engagement with their patients, the sort of “encounter” therapy that has been in vogue for years in the treatment of people with substance abuse problems, among other settings. His conduct can cross ethical boundaries. The key instance occurs in the very first session, when Will tries to deflect attention away from his own problems by suggesting that Maguire had probably been unlucky in choosing the wrong woman to love. As it happens, Maguire is still deeply mired in unresolved grief after the death of his beloved wife from cancer several years earlier. He flares angrily at Hunting, grabs him by the throat, and tells him that if he ever again disrespects his wife, “I’ll end you.” This is transgressive, unacceptable behavior for a therapist by any standard. But dramatically it works, it helps hook Hunting’s interest and bring him back for a second session.

At the second meeting, Maguire tells Will that for all his smugness and book learning, he is just a “cocky, scared shitless kid” who has “never dared to love anyone more than yourself…I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some f—king book, unless you talk about yourself. So it’s your move.” Pretty daring confrontation, wouldn’t you agree? An impasse follows, when Hunting refuses to reveal anything about himself and Maguire waits silently for this to change. Whole sessions pass in silence. Yet Will keeps showing up for appointments (in part he knows he must, of course, to avoid jail), and finally he does begin to talk. There are scenes from several more sessions at various times over the next few months.

Maguire often didactically expresses his views of Will’s central problems and issues, especially his fears of intimacy and other direct experience of the world. He also permits Will to question him about his own life experiences, and shares personal information quite freely. There are several wonderful exchanges. Near the end, Will notices one day that Maguire has been reviewing his old social case file, including photos of wounds inflicted on Will by foster fathers. Maguire then says, over and over, to Will, “It’s not your fault…It’s not your fault…It’s not your fault…” They end in a mutual hug as Will breaks down in tears.

Interspersed with therapy scenes are others depicting the deepening of Will’s romance with Skylar (she now loves him and wants him to go to California with her; he gets scared and balks; she goes west alone), his relationship with Prof. Lambeau (who pushes Will to accept a career in math), and times spent with his buddies (Chuckie, Ben Affleck’s character, in one moving scene, also urges Will to go on in math and emancipate himself from their mutual dead end life). Maguire champions Will’s right not to pursue math if he chooses, which frustrates Prof. Lambeau. Another seeming ethical transgression here is that Maguire and Lambeau meet regularly to discuss Will’s progress in therapy. Has Will consented to this? It isn’t clear that he even knows about all these discussions.

In Will’s final meeting with Maguire (the court had ordered therapy only till Will’s 21st birthday, which has now occurred), we learn that Maguire is going to take a leave of absence and travel, do some writing, move on with his life. He tells Will that he’s “…gonna put my money back on the table and see what cards I get.” Meaning that he feels ready to open himself once more to the possibility of loving someone new again. At the end, Will also makes a choice: between Skylar and a math career, between his heart and his head.

Glen and Krin Gabbard, in the 2nd edition of their classic book, “Psychiatry and the Cinema,” call the treatment depicted here “pure Hollywood fiction.” They disparage Will’s “cure” as based too much on identification with the therapist (Maguire and Hunting do share much in common: they’re both Irish, both from Southy, and both were physically abused as kids). The Gabbards further criticize the apparent “confusion of roles,” in the therapy relationship, i.e., Maguire seems to be the patient insofar as he talks so much about himself and his marriage, and his encounters with Will clearly appear to aid his movement out of the quagmire of his own grief toward personal renewal. Nevertheless, I think the Gabbards’s stance is too harsh and overly generalized.

Granted, the egregious instance in the first session, when Maguire physically threatens Will, surely is “Hollywood fiction.” But overall, I suggest that only a direct, highly active, self-disclosing treatment approach is likely to engage a young man with Will Hunting’s history and psychopathology. It is precisely with younger individuals like Will, who have personality disorders marked by acting out, smart cockiness and the inability to trust others, that traditional therapies often fail and the newer methods may work. Most of what Maguire does in the sessions, far from being Hollywood fiction, can be seen anywhere in the country in the “tough love” therapies of addictions and prison- or parole-based treatment programs.

Maguire is not only tough, he is also warm, empathic, reliable, informal, persistent, caring: all the good things one hopes for in any therapist. As for the issue of Maguire changing along lines not unlike the changes revealed for Will, this too may be less pathological than the Gabbards imply. One might say that if a therapist is truly open to a patient, not overly fortified by his or her own defenses, then the therapeutic enterprise in theory should always hold the possibility of change for both parties. What is the working out of the therapist’s countertransference problems if not a change of this nature?

GOTHIKA (Mathieu Kassovitz, US, 2003). THEME: ANTIPSYCHIATRY MOVIES. I saw this film only because several visitors to this website suggested it as a "psychlflick" worth my attention. Regrets all around.  To be considered a “psychological” drama or comedy, whether good or bad, a film should try at least a little to represent psychiatric or psychological themes in a coherent manner.  No issue or theme presented In Gothika is remotely connected to psychiatric illness or treatment, unless you count ghosts and spirit possession.  Granted, the heroine is nominally a psychiatrist, and much of the film takes place inside a prison mental hospital. But saying these are grounds for calling the movie a psychological drama is like saying a film in which employees at a bank are held hostage and traumatized by robbers is a film about banking.  Far from being a legitimate psychflick, Gothika is lodged squarely in the horror/thriller genre, and isn’t even good by the standards of this film category. It is hopelessly burdened by a thousand illogical, inexplicable plot twists and bursting with overwrought, melodramatic gestures at every bloody and shadowy turn. 

As such, the film doesn't merit detailed discussion.  Suffice it to say, Berry’s character finds herself locked up as a patient on her own ward, accused of the brutal murder of her husband, another doc who ran the place.  Occult forces seem to propel her to fight for her freedom and solve this mess.  (Lots of luck.)  Other forces want to destroy her.   Actor Robert Downey, Jr. stays out of drug rehab. long enough to appear in this movie as a colleague of Berry’s assigned to treat her.   He hasn’t a clue.  He can’t even get his stethoscope to drape properly around his neck like all medical students learn to do.     

Because the psychiatrist (played by Halle Berry, though Heaven knows why she chose to) is pretty badly knocked around throughout the film – by real people as well as spirits, one esteemed colleague of mine called this an anti-psychiatry film. That’s not true on the face of it. You have to establish some semblance of slipshod yet credible professional (mis)conduct to set up an anti-psychiatry theme. Everything done in this film by doctors and nurses is so over-the-top, ludicrous, totally discountable, not worth a second thought.  Example: what's a shrink doing incarcerated on her own ward with her own patients, being treated by a close colleague?   Shheeeez.  There’s an age-old, clear-cut Hollywood formula for anti-psychiatry movies when a woman is cast as the psychiatrist. It goes like this: (Female) doctor meets (male) patient; doctor screws patient; everybody gets better.  End of plot.  

You want more?  Check out the reviews on the Movie Review Query Engine, at www.mrqe.com.  There you’ll find that Roger Ebert loved the film as great, lurid trash, while James Berardinelli says, “Stupidity to a degree can sometimes be forgiven.  Stupidity to this degree can not and should not.”  I'm with him.  Grade: D (11/04)

GRAY’S ANATOMY (Steven Soderbergh, US, 1996). THEME: HYPOCHONDRIASIS. Film of one of the late Spalding Gray’s best monologues. Gray has an eye condition that can be surgically corrected. But instead he decides to seek alternative treatments and embarks on a journey that will take him to Christian Science, Native American sweat lodges and psychic surgeons, among others. What stands out, as usual in gray’s work, is his neuroticism and self absorbtion, his obsessive entanglement in his own symptoms. Grade: B- (04/97)

GRBAVICA (Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia, 2006, 91 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (WOMEN). SPOILER ALERT! Intimate, soulful story of Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a single mother, and her 12 year old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). Set in the present in the seedy Grbavica district of Sarajevo, this film explores the far reaches of trauma in the Bosnian war: how the psychic wounds inflicted in that terrible time remain open and unhealed to this day. The film opens with the camera panning a dark, rich kilim rug behind the front credits, sweeping next over the faces of women lying on the rug, finally to a special face, a sweet, sad woman’s face, her eyes staring painfully straight into our own. Thus, in an instant, before any dialogue, we are engaged with this woman, riveted by her, and she interests us deeply from this first moment.

This sense of intense engagement prevails throughout this well told, well photographed narrative. We feel impelled to care about the reclusive, hesitant Esma, Sara, her saucy, spirited daughter, and the one man in the story, Pelda (Leon Lucev) who - although he is a gun toting thug like all the others we meet in the netherworld of Grbavica - is so much more: a devoted son to his shut-in aging mother and a respectful, tender suitor to Esma. Status among the kids hinges on whether their long dead fathers were sheheens – Bosnian loyalists who fought to the death, or the unspeakable alternative, bastards produced by the systematic rape of Bosnian women captured by the enemy in the Bosnian War, the Chetnik Serbs.

We visit a women’s trauma support group, conducted by the same social worker who also passes out subsistence grants. Esma only attends on the days when grants are issued, and she remains silent even then. But we know she’s disturbed. She startles visibly watching a butcher chop off the head of a fish. Twice at the nightclub where she works she is overcome watching a sexy Ukrainian waitress in an embrace with one of the owner’s thug buddies, and she must run to the bathroom to vomit or cry. Her private, silent avoidance of the painful memories of her own captivity is in the end intruded upon by Sara’s demands to know more about her father, and why it is that Esma cannot produce the customary document certifying that he was in fact a Bosnian soldier killed in action.

This is a bittersweet story, full of love between mother and daughter and silently suffered pain, teen infatuation, life on the mean streets, and, in the end, hope for a better future. Grbavica swept the film awards at the 2006 Berlin IFF: Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, Best Peace Film, and Special Ecumenical Jury Award. (In Serbo-Croatian) Grade: A-

GRILL POINT (Andreas Dresen, Germany, 2002). THEME: MARITAL DYSFUNCTION & INFIDELITY. A domestic tragicomedy set in present day Frankfurt, exploring the emotional repercussions among two married couples - Uwe and Ellen, Chris and Katrin, all long time friends - when Chris and Ellen embark upon an affair. Everyone works full time and more to make ends meet; and the chill of ebbing affection is palpable in both couples. Uwe (who runs the downtown lunch eaterie of the film's title and a catering business) and Ellen (who clerks at a perfumery) are very devoted to their two children. Uwe tries to provide for Ellen's material comfort, but he is harshly critical of her, and she's about had it with his derisions. Chris and Katrin are childless, though Chris's late teen daughter from his first marriage often pops in unannounced to bed her latest date and sleep over. Katrin, who weighs loads at a huge truckstop on the edge of town, seems more accepting of Chris, a morose fellow at odds with the upbeat persona he projects as a morning pop radio DJ. Chris is your basic passive aggressive, dependent neurotic, less deserving of one’s sympathies than the others.  (My opinion as a psychiatrist is that people should not act out their neurotic stuff with family and friends but instead with their therapists!)

All four roles are well played, especially given the fact that the actors improvised their roles according to character and story arcs without the aid of a script. The circumstances of stagnant marriage and breakdown, although we all know these by heart from a hundred other films, novels and talkshow scenarios, are put forward here with intelligence, clarity, respect and humor. Another strength is that these people seem real; even Chris's style is familiar to anyone. I think this would make an excellent teaching film for beginning couples counselors, and a thoughtful trigger film for couples suffering from conjugal distress. The ending is a happy one, although in a manner you might not be expecting. Dresen follows a number of the Danish “Dogme 95” rules here, including use of a hand held camera and natural lighting. (In German) Grade:  B (01/03)

GRIZZLY MAN (Werner Herzog, US, 2005, 103 m). THEMES: BIPOLAR DISORDER; BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER. Herzog, a masterful documentarian, has used 100 hours of video footage shot over five summers by Timothy Treadwell to craft an intriguing story of this man, whose fanatical devotion to Alaskan Grizzies led him to take risks that, in 2003, finally resulted in a lethal attack by a bear that killed him and his companion, Amie Huguenard.

Treadwell had failed in several career attempts, was for a time a card carrying alcoholic, and very likely suffered from either a bipolar disorder or severe borderline personality. He was a social misfit who discovered some peace of mind trekking in the wilderness of the Alaskan peninsula, where he encountered Grizzlies for the first time. Thrilled by them, he returned each summer for the next 12 years, usually alone, spending two to three months gradually identifying individual bears within a national wildlife preserve, naming them, approaching them ever more closely, to the point of touching (he also made friends with red foxes, who seemed quite at home with Treadwell, unlike the always diffident Grizzlies).

Treadwell’s videos began during his ninth summer and often feature him talking directly into the camera. Herzog more than once compliments Treadwell's success in shooting interesting scenes (he would do multiple takes of some in which he featured himself). Herzo