SAFE (Todd Haynes, US, 1995). THEME: MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITY DISORDER. Safe is probably the first feature film to take up the theme of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) disorders. This contemporary techno-affliction arises in adults heretofore enjoying apparent good health, who develop a panoply of physical and/or emotional symptoms not easily explained on a conventional basis. Specific symptoms vary from person to person. The theory here is that these symptoms may be reactions to chemicals found in the environment (these disorders are also termed by some as “environmental sensitivity” disorders). In classical industrial and environmental toxicity, the poisonous nature of the offending substance is scientifically established, and exposure affects many people. Of course in some instances, such as cancer from chemical pollutants, only some individuals develop the disease, presumably because of some interaction of the chemical with other factors that only apply to certain people. 

Environmental sensitivity pushes this paradigm further, to situations in which the posited offending chemical agent or agents occur at very low concentrations that do not affect the great majority of individuals. The very small minority who are afflicted, it is thought, must have some special vulnerability to these agents, which may include a broad array of substances, everything from inhaled products like engine emissions or common household solvents and personal hygiene fragrances, to internal poisoning from the small amount of mercury contained in dental amalgams. Why some individuals should become sensitized to such substances has not been satisfactorily explained. About 85-90% of patients are women, and onset is typically between age 30 and 50. 

The most common symptoms are fatigue, diminished concentration and memory, depression, weakness, dizziness, and headache. About half of patients meet criteria for depression and anxiety disorders, but the relationship of such disorders to MCS is not clear. That is, it is not reliably known whether the psychiatric condition is a cause or consequence of MCS, or simply a coincidental problem. Some sufferers believe that living in environments controlled to maintain low chemical exposure is the only strategy for combating such disorders. Many scientists and physicians no not accept the validity of these disorders, because the science of toxicology has not established the health hazards of low levels of chemicals posited to account for symptoms in most MCS disorders. Nor do the clinical disorders conform to a common model for allergic illnesses. So many health professionals discount these putative illnesses as physical, thinking of them instead as the consequences of depression, anxiety or psychosomatic disorders. (A non-judgmental reference on the subject is “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome” by Michael K. Magill and Anthony Suruda, in the journal, American Family Physician, vol. 58, pp. 721-730, September 1, 1998.) 

The protagonist in Safe is Carol White (Julianne Moore in her first major film role; Haynes and Moore teamed up again more recently in Far From Heaven), who lives the material life of a moneyed suburban housewife in Southern California. She, her spouse and her stepson occupy a house the size of Hearst's castle, and she whiles away her days shopping and partying with other women like herself. She has a vague sense that life could be better, more substantive, more fulfilling, but isn’t deeply troubled by these fleeting thoughts. Then she starts to have health troubles out of the blue, really bad things, like collapsing in a faint, spontaneous nosebleeds, acute anxiety episodes with shortness of breath, associated with transient delirium in which she doesn’t know where she is. 

Apart from the nosebleeds, her symptoms could be accounted for by depression and panic disorder with hyperventilation leading to confusion and fainting. But these episodes, or at least some of them, seem to occur when she is in proximity to fuel emissions, household cleaners, and the like. Then there’s the nosebleeds, not your everyday marker for emotional troubles. Her family doctor rolls his eyes at all of this and bundles her off to a psychiatrist from Hell, a wooden goon who looks out at Carol from behind his desk in a sterile, contemptuous manner guaranteed to drive away any sensible person. Getting worse, and getting only the fish eye or worse from her spouse and friends, she finally in desperation answers a bulletin board ad and winds up at a New Age style commune for people with chemical sensitivity disorders, where, at film’s end, she is feeling a bit better and planning to stay on.

Safe, written as well as directed by Haynes, is a most peculiar film. The story is sympathetic to MCS sufferers, but in a left-handed way. Their plight - caught between the skepticism and condescension of intimates and doctors, on the one hand, and the acceptance and emotional support of fringe practitioners and fellow sufferers, on the other – is well narrated. But by and large Haynes seems to slam just about everyone, patients included, in a sort of take-no-prisoners critique of the MCS phenomenon. Carol White is portrayed as a dependent, childlike ditz, with zero self esteem and about enough introspective acumen to fill a small thimble. Her friends are all superficial spoiled spenders, but at least they aren’t sick: they love their material world. 

Carol’s husband Greg (Xander Berkeley) is a robo-business Neanderthal type. He has absolutely no patience with or capacity to understand Carol’s problems, seeing only that her mysterious malady is thwarting his sex life, and it makes him mad. Carol’s friends are taken aback, concerned in a vague way, but clearly more interested in their next trip to the mall. The doctors are of no use. The commune is run by a guru named Peter (Peter Friedman), a snake oil charmer who preaches the line that (a) MCS is caused by a breakdown in the body’s immune functions, and (b) the immune breakdown is caused by lack of self love and by pursuing a lifestyle that violates humanistic values. Only the commune’s co-director, Claire (Kate McGregor-Stewart) comes across as a solid, no-nonsense, warm and caring human being. The final hopeful note of the film is Carol’s statement that she may be starting, just a smidge, to love herself, as if this is the key to recovery.

So what is this film? Does Haynes believe that MCS is real? Is this film his sincere effort to shine light on this contemporary medical conundrum? He certainly suggests that the basis of MCS is psychological in nature. Does he take the New Age, emotional approach to the disorder seriously? Or is this film a broad-brush satire all around, sparing no one? Who can tell? Grade: B- (05/03)

THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS (Rose Troche, US, 2001/2003). THEMES: TROUBLED RELATIONSHIPS AND FAMILIES; IMPACT OF DISABILITY ON FAMILY. This film knocked about on the festival circuit for nearly two years before a poorly promoted regular theater distribution in 2003. It’s easy to see why it has languished. It fits squarely in the genre of  ‘suburban psychodrama.’ The movie is ponderous from beginning to end, heavy with a gloom of pathos brought on by, among other things, an auto accident a year or more earlier that affected the lives of most of the principal characters and left a young teenage boy in perpetual coma.

After opening with very clever credits that mention four families who live in the same cluster of homes - showing us the families and their houses as white paper cutouts, we are plunged into a rapidly changing, thoroughly confusing series of intercut scenes that casually and chaotically introduce us to at least 16 characters, including all the kids. Gradually, as in a Robert Altman film, this chaos does gives way to some order, though aspects of the narrative remain shrouded in the mystery of the auto accident, details of which are only slowly brought to our attention, some crucial elements only at the end.

It won’t serve any useful purpose here to plunge into the endless details of these people’s lives or the narrative arc of the film. The film’s title seems to refer to our tendency to distract ourselves either with material goods (a child’s Barbie doll or basketball, a lawyer’s fancy new dishwasher, overdue child support payments, a contest to win a new SUV) or strangers (a pickup date in a tavern, a contrived allegiance to a neighbor’s cause, the kidnapping of one child to replace another that died) to assuage bad feelings and troubled relationships.

Among the large acting ensemble, several of the kids do well, especially Kristen Stewart as tomboy Sam Jennings. As for the adults, Dermot Mulroney is amazingly stupid playing an ambitious corporate lawyer in career doldrums. Mulroney better watch out: this role coupled with his performance as the doofus son in law to be in About Schmidt may typecast him so that only the Farrelly Brothers keep his number in their Rolidex. Glenn Close and the ubiquitous Patricia Clarkson fare better, each giving a competent turn as the principal women in the film. Too bad their talents are wasted on such glum business. The movie is the stuff of TV soaps and nothing more. By comparison, it makes The Ice Storm and American Beauty seem like great films (which they aren’t). Grade: C+ (12/03)

SARABAND (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden/Norway, 2003, 120 m). THEMES: FAMILY DYNAMICS; THREE GENERATIONAL CONFLICTS; LIFE REVIEW. Now well past his mid-80s, Ingmar Bergman continues to create thought provoking psychological dramas. Technically, he has stuck to his word that his 1982 film, Fanny and Alexander, would be the last he made for the big screen; Saraband, like his other work since Fanny, was made for Swedish television. It doesn’t matter. For all its convolutions, Saraband is a story of family and love: love’s entrenchment and endurance, its vicissitudes, the terrible power of its loss and the surprising possibilities for its discovery.

On an impulse possibly connected to life review, Marianne (Liv Ullmann), an attorney in her early 60s still practicing law, decides to visit her former husband Johan (Erland Josephson), now in his mid-80s. They haven’t seen one another in 30 years. (These two characters, played by the same actors, were in fact first introduced to us by Bergman 30 years ago in Scenes from a Marriage.) Johan’s a retired music academic now holed up at his back country house, living alone. He’s rich, vainglorious and, till recently, was a lifelong womanizer. In a cabin on the same property, Johan’s son by another marriage, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), a widower who is also a musician, lives with his 20 year old daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), whom Henrik is teaching to prepare her for a career as a cello soloist. Another character, whose influence on these people is palpable, is Henrik’s wife (and Karin’s mother) Anna, who died two years earlier.

Johan and Henrik despise each other, always have. Johan perceives Henrik as weak and clingy (he is) and this has always been repulsive to Johan. On the other hand, Johan is unconflicted in his adoration of his granddaughter. This is so often the case: the ogre parent can at the same time be a sweetie pie grandparent. Johan’s doting is fully reciprocated by Karin. But she is locked in deep conflict with her father, Henrik. He wants to control her destiny, mold her career in ways she feels are not right for her. Most of all he wants to cling to her. It also turns out that Johan has his own scheme to push Karin’s career along the same lines she deplores. The frictions in these parent-child relations have intensified since Anna’s death: her loving acceptance of everybody had at least kept them all civil.

Marianne walks into the middle of this three generational cauldron of conflict and wishes she hadn’t. Nevertheless, she is drawn especially to Karin, who uses Marianne as a confidante. This is most gratifying for Marianne, whose relations with her own grown daughters (by another man) have always been tenuous in the extreme. One moved as far away as possible (Australia) and the other is institutionalized because of severe autism or chronic catatonia. So Marianne stays on at Johan’s house.

The family plot thickens when Karin asserts herself, eschewing a soloist’s career for orchestral work, frustrating both her father and grandfather. Henrik cannot bear being without her. He has nurtured suicidal impulses since Anna’s death, his tenuous grip on life sustained only by his devotion to Karin and her presence. His suicide attempt is a predictable response to Karin’s successful emancipation. But he and his father survive well enough. The only real surprise in the story is the unexpected opening of Marianne’s heart to her own daughter, an opening brought about as much perhaps by the lingering spirit of Anna’s presence as by Marianne’s closeness to Karin.

This film feels very much like Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless (the latter written by Bergman and directed by Ms. Ullmann). It really doesn’t break new ground. Nor are the characters well developed. But it does leave its mark by depicting the parallel development of Karin’s emancipation from the dominating men in her family and Marianne’s emancipation from the strictures on her own heart. (In Swedish) Grade: B+ (08/05)

THE SAVAGES (Tamara Jenkins, US, 2007, 113 min.). THEMES: AGING; DEMENTIA; CAREGIVERS; INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY CONFLICT; SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS. First rate family drama/comedy in which two siblings, Wendy (Laura Linney) and her older brother Jon (the ubiquitous Philip Seymour Hoffman), must come to the aid of their estranged father, Lenny (Philip Bosco) when his dementia progresses to the point where he can no longer care for himself. Lenny is an irascible, cold, foul mouthed man, who was possibly abusive to his children when they were young, and to his wife, who ran away many years earlier. Struggling to come to terms with their father, Wendy at one point says to Jon, “Maybe dad didn't abandon us. Maybe he just forgot who we were.” Jon in turn says at another point, “we’ll take better care of the old man than he ever did for us."

Wendy, an unsuccessful playwright, and Jon, a college professor who works endlessly on a book, each have had lifelong impairment in their capacity for intimate relationships with potential partners and with one another. They struggle in their reactions to their father’s decline, and in their efforts to find consensus about decisions that must be made concerning Lenny. Wendy’s response is one of emotional volatility, while Jon is more matter of fact, the more practical of the two.

SAVING GRACE (Nigel Cole, UK, 2000). THEME: MARIJUANA. Set in a remote fishing village in the north of England, this is a lame comedy in which Grace, a middle aged woman (Brenda Blethyn), is confronted by enormous debts after her husband dies. Her young gardener Matthew (Craig Ferguson, who also wrote the screenplay and co-produced) is a major pot consumer, along with his girlfriend and buddies, including the town doctor. Grace is renown in the region for growing prize orchids, and Matthew asks her help in resuscitating some marijuana plants that are barely alive. The plants thrive, inspiring the pair to hatch a scheme to pay off Grace's debts and save her house, by raising marijuana to sell. It's a preposterous, too cute script in many ways and not terribly funny in ideas, dialogue or acting. Grade: C (12/00)

SAVIOUR SQUARE (Plac Zbawiciela) (Joanna Kos-Krause & Krzysztof Krause, Poland, 2006, 105 m.). SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY CONFLICT; DEPRESSION. A widow, Teresa (Ewa Wencel), is, on the one hand, a tiny but tough, outspoken woman, employed in a high level job and physically fit, but she’s also prone to depression and regularly takes haloperidol (a very strong tranquilizer) and another psychoactive medication as well. Against her wishes, she has reluctantly taken in four houseguests in her somewhat cramped apartment, people who are open-endly staying on with her: her deadbeat son Bartek (Arkadiusz Janiczek), who can’t or won’t find work, and whom Teresa judges to be just like his abusive father, Bartek's wife Beata (Jowita [Miondlikowska] Budnik), who is chronically depressed, overweight, pouty, and also cannot work, she claims, because she must care for her two young children, also camping at grandma’s. This well wrought psychodrama follows the course and conflicts of these people over several weeks, or is it months? In the event, things go from bad to worse as the jagged edged, claustrophobic family circumstances grind on toward a critical resolution that lands Beata in prison for 15 years. The photography gives us many excellent close up views of the principals and the kids, which enhances the sense of people experiencing way too much togetherness for their own good. Wencel, Budnik and Janiczek collaborated on the screenplay, adding dialogue, suggesting that the Krauses work somethat in the fashion of Ken Loach. (In Polish). Grade: B+ (02/08)

SCHIZOPOLIS (Steven Soderbergh, US, 1996). THEMES: ANOMIE IN THE SUBURBS; ANTI-SCIENTOLOGY; SEXUAL OBSESSION. A bizarre array of digs at modern life, e.g., suburbia, the corporate ratrace, Scientology, sexual obsession, and the degradation of language. The film is full of jumpcuts and odd camera angles. This sort of thing often jars and distracts. Here it works to intensify the sense of fragmentation of the protagonist’s life. Mr. Soderbergh was present to discuss the film at the screening I attended. He shot it during spare moments over a year’s time on a shoestring budget, using his friends as actors willing to work for next to nothing, and cast himself in the lead because that also was the cheapest way to go. In fact Soderbergh proves to be a wonderful deadpan comedian in the role of Fletcher Munson, who works for the cult known as “Eventualism.” Grade: B (02/97)

SCHULTZE GETS THE BLUES (Michael Schorr, Germany, 2003, 114 min.). THEME: COPING WITH LONELINESS AND ENNUI AFTER RETIREMENT. For those of you in a rush, here’s a microreview: “Satisfying, long, slow moving, quirky geezer comic road movie from Germany.” For others, here’s more. This film is in the tradition of slow moving droll European comedies like last year’s Kitchen Stories, Hukkle or Leningrad Cowboys Go America.  Schultze (Horst Krause) and his best buddies, Jürgen and Manfred, have toiled literally in a salt mine for 30 years and now retire. There isn’t a whole lot to do in their small town on the Saale River in the eastern part of Germany. Schultze’s two cronies are soon entrained by their wives into domestic serfdom, but the stout, phlegmatic Schultze himself must bear the burden of freedom. His wife is shut away in a nursing home, the victim of moderately severe Alzheimers. Schultze dutifully visits her, where he is much sought after by a libidinal and cognitively unimpeded woman with a ready bottle of Bushmill’s single malt. He gets regular opportunities to drink beer and play chess with his mates. But much of the time he is left to wash the faces of the statuary gnomes in his garden, practice the accordion (he basically knows about two polkas) and dine alone.  

We watch for a long time as Schultze lives out his slow paced and unexciting daily life (a major feature of his day is a battle of wits with the fellow in the railroad observation tower who runs the manually operated gate at the road crossing; he likes to leave the gate down, to elicit the impatient ringing of Schultze’s bike bell.) Finally, near the half way mark, Schultze is selected to represent his town, and to play his accordion, at a festival in New Braunfels, Texas, his town’s “sister city.” (Earlier, when he had said he hoped he would not be chosen, one of his friends showed a keen awareness of Texas justice, teasing, “Hey, Schultze, you afraid they’ll put you in the electric chair for your polka.”)

The remainder of the film tracks his adventures in the U.S., first in New Braunfels (he sees how good the other accordionists are and never goes near the stage to play), then running a small fishing boat down a river to the Gulf, then over to what is probably the lower Mississippi delta region in Louisiana. Nothing much happens, beyond running out of gas once. He gets on well enough with people, though his English vocabulary consists of about four words, goes to dances, sees a lot of scenery, and winds up under a full moon on the roof of a delta houseboat, where the owners, a black woman and her daughter, have taken Schultze in, fed him full of fresh steamed crab, and taken him to a Cajun dance. Not an ebullient soul, Schultze nonetheless seems content with his travels and writes regularly to his friends about his adventures. The film ends on a somewhat somber note but that does not nullify the sense one has of having been quietly and sweetly amused. (In German & English) . Grade: B+ (02/05)

THE SEA  (Baltasar Kormakur, Iceland, 2003).  THEME: INTERGENERATIONAL FAMILY CONFLICT.  Kormakur directed the great little comedy, 101 Rekjavik, so I was eager to see his new work.  Like 101, Sea is filled with over-the-top, outrageous behavior.  But there is a stark difference between the films.  Throughout Sea, I kept looking for the drollery that enriched 101, but the laughs never arrive.  Although technically well made, what we have here is your standard, straight forward sturm und drang family psychodrama about rich, spoiled people, blind to their own foibles, who act in extremely destructive ways toward themselves and one another.  Everyone - father, stepmother, the three adult children, two married in-laws, and a step sister, they're all a pack of louts. 

Only the father has any socially redeeming features.  Though he can't stand his kids (he is a pretty good judge of people), he is concerned for the welfare of his community, the future of the small fishing village where he owns a huge fish cannery, the economic backbone of the town.  He's been having a series of t.i.a.'s lately and must give up control of the company to save his health.  But to whom?  His children?  God forbid.  He fears that if he sells his fishing quotas (permits to fish, issued by the government, that amount to an equity interest that can be bought or sold privately) along with his plant, the buyer might shut down the plant and use the quotas to ship fish to a larger facility somewhere else, where processing would be cheaper.  This would spell disaster for the village.

The best of his three kids is a cowardly sneak of a man who is a manager at the plant and is secretly trying to arrange a deal to sell off the business, behind Dad's back.  His sister is an extremely dangerous shrew who likes to forklift people in their cars and dump them into the bay for sport.  The kid brother lives in Paris to detach himself and, using money Dad sends for college, he is taking art lessons and having fun.  Back home on a visit with his French fiancee in tow, he has no trouble rekindling his old passion for his half-sister, starting some very nasty family arguments, and creating one Helluva splendid industrial fire, which we see burning at the beginning and again at the end of the film.  The kids cannot forgive their father for starting an affair with their aunt - their mother's sister - as mother lay dying of cancer years ago (subsequently she became their stepmother). 

These are the ingredients of this relentlessly earnest yet outrageous film.  The film is OK - it certainly is well acted and well photographed - but it adds no new wrinkle to the genre.  Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe set the standard, at least for marital bickering.  If you want to see a first rate contemporary extended family squabble, look at the 1996 French film, Un Air de Famille (Family Resemblances), by Cedric Klapisch.  Or try Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 offering, The Celebration.  The only mildly interesting character in Sea is the grandmother, herself a clichéd character who is simply fed a number of blunt and funny lines. (In Icelandic)   Grade B (02/03)

THE SEA INSIDE (Mar adentro) (Alejandro Amenabar, Spain, 2004). THEMES: EUTHANASIA, ASSISTED SUICIDE. This richly produced docudrama makes the case for the right of an individual with a severe, irreversible medical illness, debilitating injury or handicap to choose suicide, and to be assisted by others if necessary, without risk of penalties to those who aid the individual.The issue here is not physician assisted suicide,but something broader: euthanasia or mercy killing at the request of the person with the illness, suicide, if you will, assisted by anyone – friends, relatives or others.The story is based on the life and death of a real person, Ramon Sampedro (played brilliantly in the film by Javier Bardem), a quadriplegic Spanish fisherman who fought for nearly 30 years for his right to die.

At the age of 25, Sampedro suffered a severe injury to the cervical spine in a diving accident. A formerly hearty, physically robust young man, he became miserable living a shut in, bedridden life, even though he was able to develop keen writing skills, to the point of publishing a book of his experiences and poems, “Letters from the Inferno.” Cared for by his devoted sister-in-law and other relatives, he also remained a charming and persuasive man, capable of attracting the allegiance and support of many people, especially women. With the assistance of several attorneys, Sampedro challenged the Spanish law that declared it a felony to assist another person to commit suicide, punishable with a prison sentence of up to 10 years. He won judicial reviews at both state and federal levels, but his bids to overturn the law were unsuccessful.

He lost patience with this legal struggle after five years and carried out a carefully contrived plan that culminated with Sampedro filming himself sipping a lethal potassium cyanide solution, in 1998. "When I have drunk this I will have renounced one of the worst types of slavery, that of being a living head glued to a dead body," he said in the videotape later shown on Spanish television. "You can punish [the person helping me] if you want. But you know that what you will simply be doing is seeking revenge when, in fact, I am the only person responsible for my actions." Spanish police tried to find out who was behind the camera and who helped prepare the cyanide, but eventually gave up. Sampedro’s case has become one of the most celebrated in the Death with Dignity movement in Western Europe.

All the arguments concerning euthanasia are presented here, albeit with a bias in favor. Most lively is a shouting debate Ramon conducts with Padre Francisco (Jose Maria Pou), a quadriplegic priest who has come to the Sampedro house to talk Ramon into abandoning his quest for death. The priest’s wheelchair is too bulky to be brought up to Ramon’s bedroom, and Ramon has no intention of coming down to see the priest, who had previously suggested on national television that the problem here was that Ramon’s family did not love or care for him sufficiently, a charge that was both false and insulting. So the two spar amusingly by shouting up and down a stairwell. Fr. Francisco asserts that our bodies are not private property but belong to God. Ramon snorts that he thought there was no greater champion of private property than the Church, with its vast wealth. Ramon’s sister-in-law Manuela (Mabel Rivera) gets the last word, telling the priest as he departs that one thing she is sure of is that he has a very big mouth.

Limited to an exploration of the pros and cons of its subject, this film could have become constipated and platitudinous, edifying but abstract, academic, dull. Instead there is a vitality in the film, a fine drama of the grit of real people bearing difficult burdens. It is in the particulars of how Ramon’s situation affects the rest of his family that the movie finds life and touches us. Ramon’s father is quietly full of grief. He takes visitors to the cove where Ramon dove the day of his accident all those years ago, and you know that for the old man, this event happened just yesterday. There is a harsh encounter between Ramon and his older brother, who has given up his life as a fisherman to make a home to care for Ramon. The brother is furious with Ramon for making an already difficult life, in which the others have made sacrifices for Ramon, even harder by bringing notoriety, embarrassment and shame upon all of them. Then there is Manuela, the brother’s wife, who has given herself completely to caring for Ramon; she lives in a perpetual state of unconditional devotion and service. Finally there is Javi, their son, Ramon’s nephew, a teenager whom Ramon loves like the son he could never have.

The movie is visually gorgeous. A scene of Ramon’s fateful dive and near death experience is rerun several times with all the force of an unbidden reoccurring flashback of traumatic events. Other scenes show Ramon’s fantasies come to life, moments when he soars up and away from his confinement, flying across fields and hills to the water he loves.

Bardem was only 34 when Sea Inside was made, but beyond the art of makeup, Bardem invests the role of Ramon with the gravitas and weary patience one would expect to find in a worn and sickly man of fifty. That’s not all, though. Bardem’s Ramon is also an entrancing presence in nearly every scene, bringing charisma, liveliness, passion, wit and grace to his performance purely by means of facial gesture and manner of speaking.

The supporting cast are all excellent, especially the women, Ms. Rivera and several others: Belen Rueda (as Julia, a married lawyer with a degenerative neurological disorder who falls in love with Ramon and gets his writings published), Lola Dueñas (as Rosa, a young, sorrowful radio dj who is dependently infatuated with Ramon), and Clara Segura (Gené, a young legal aide).

SECONDHAND LIONS (Tim McCanlies, US, 2003). THEME: AGING: AUTONOMY AND A LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP OF TWO ECCENTRIC OLD MEN ARE EXPLORED IN A COMEDY THAT LEANS HEAVILY ON STEREOTYPES. A two for one special: a geezerflick and coming-of-age combo about a boy, Walter (Haley Joel Osment), who is dumped off by his trashy mother at the dilapidated midwestern farm where his two eccentric great uncles live, so she can get back to enjoying her low life in Las Vegas unfettered by parental obligations. The old gents (a crustily avuncular Michael Caine and a menacing, slightly crazed Robert Duvall) are reputed to be filthy rich, and the rumors of how they came by their fortune vary from big city crime to African high adventures. Walter’s mother also hopes he can worm his way into the codgers’ favor and get himself and Mom named in their wills. Turns out there’s already plenty of competition for this honor, ranging from a lugubrious group of relatives to a retinue of salesmen whom the geezers fend off with rifle fire, which is also their preferred method for catching fish.

Caine and Duvall pretty much sleepwalk through their roles, as stock Hollywood tough-old-buzzards-with-hearts-of-gold. In fact nearly all the parts in this film are standard Hollywood types, including five dogs of uncertain pedigree, a pig and a genuine secondhand lion that are called upon to buoy up the proceedings whenever things start to sag too much, a not uncommon occurrence. The exception is 15 year old Osment (that special kid from The Sixth Sense), who continues to build upon his long but still youthful career with another intelligent turn here: he can be convincingly vulnerable or assertive, but always with a preternatural air of self possession. Alas, neither Osment nor the animals deliver quite enough to make this film worth recommending, except to those who find pleasure in treading water through familiar swamps of sentiment and stereotype. Grade: (drama and portrayals of aging): C+ (06/04)

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005, 115 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN A WOMAN SURVIVOR OF BOSNIAN WAR. SPOILER ALERT! Isabel Coixet’s well crafted narrative screenplay interweaves two subtexts: an intriguing psychodrama about the long lasting wounds of war trauma and a convoluted, slowly building love story of two damaged people brought together by chance on an oil rig in the North Sea. Josef (Tim Robbins), an engineer on the pumping station, has been burned and temporarily blinded while trying in vain to save a coworker from a fiery suicide. Hanna (Sarah Polley), a social recluse who works as an assembly line factory worker in England, has more or less been forced by the HR department to take a month long holiday, to quell the animosity of her fellow workers, who resent her scrupulous punctuality and four year record of never having taken leave for illness or vacation.

A chance conversation in a tavern leads her to volunteer to serve as a nurse to Josef, aboard the oil rig. (Hanna had been trained in and practiced nursing for several years in the past.) The initial encounters between Hanna and Josef are spiced with unpredictable thrust and parry. Josef does the thrusting: mouthing off provocative sexualized comments to Hanna, like a guy coming on at a bar. She in turn remains all but mute; she won’t even tell her name at first. She is diffident toward the rest of the crew as well. Slowly over the next days she lowers her guard, begins to thaw with everyone. In time Hanna shares her story with Josef. Her origins in Sarajevo. Her detention along with other women by their own Bosnian troops, who held her captive for months and systematically raped and mutilated her and the others. She tells Josef that he’s just like those other men, harboring only a lascivious interest in women. She also tells him that a friend of hers was forced to kill her young daughter by shooting her through the vagina, though we suspect that the “friend” was Hanna herself.

This catharsis, possibly her first disclosure to someone other than her therapist (played by Julie Christie) seems to dissipate Hanna’s deep malaise. Josef discloses his own sources of remorse: his affair with a woman married to his closest friend, possibly the same man who had suicided aboard the rig, though we cannot be sure. Josef in time is medivaced for care in a hospital and Hanna returns to the factory. But in the end they find each other in a plausible reconnection that is tender and genuine but devoid of any sentimental pretensions.

A nice sidebar is provided: some glimpses of how men on the rig pass time. They improvise playground swings, play cards, make up song and dance performances, and a few engage in homoerotic encounters. The supporting cast of crew members is very good, led by the chef, Simon (Javier Cámara). All in all this bittersweet production offers a compelling view of the far reaches of the grotesque trauma of war. (In English) Grade: B+

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS  (Alan Rudolph, US, 2003).  THEME: COPING WITH MARITAL INFIDELITY.  Here’s a domestic tragicomedy that is neither sad nor funny.  But it is a believable account of a couple overcoming a crisis of marital infidelity.  Well, overcoming may be too strong a term and a bit misleading.  It’s more a matter of two people slip sliding their way through a crisis, avoiding explicit communication about their conjugal problems and disappointments, about the burdens that have led to doubts and loss of confidence in their relationship.  Instead of breaking up, they more or less just tacitly agree to stay together and move on.  This isn’t the idealized sort of resolution prized by marriage therapists.  Far from it.   Neither party consults a counselor.  Nobody “processes” any  “issues” here.  But what does occur is undoubtedly a lot closer to the truth for many people, an accurate reflection of the way couples often patch up strains, even if it means that their differences are only swept under the rug, leaving a bump that could trip them up on another day.  

David (Campbell Scott) and Dana (Hope Davis) met in dental school.  She was the smart one.  He was swept away by her.  Now, 10 years on, they share a joint dental practice in the suburbs and are raising three young daughters.  The couple are in the throes of the unglamorous, labor intensive phase that supercedes the halcyon days of infatuation, courtship and childless early marriage.  Between the grind of the dental drills and the domestic grind, life is, well, a grind.  David, who’s a dear fellow at heart, by chance witnesses Dana nuzzling with another man, and his fantasies go wild.  He is nagged by all the inevitable rush of hostile, cynical, frightening worries and vengeful impulses, impulses that become embodied in an alter-ego, a man named Slater, a devil perched metaphorically on David’s shoulder, played by a leering Denis Leary, who’s a scold of an unsatisfied dental patient in David’s practice.  

The problem here is that the ocean of tedium and plain hard work in which the couple are barely keeping afloat is so authentically realized that the film is basically a drudge to watch.  It rekindles all the old feelings of fatigue and ennui that all adults finished with childrearing have quite properly packed away in our mental attics, where they should remain, undisturbed and unexamined, at all times.  Scott offers a wonderful turn as the longsuffering cuckold and unceasingly dependable father.  But how is one expected to enjoy a movie in which (1) the dialogue varies between the mundane and the nonexistent; (2) the role written to provide comic relief (Leary as Slater) bombs – for Leary here is not funny in the least; and (3) a major source of dramatic tension at the center of the story is provided when a gastro-intestinal disorder sweeps through the family, drenching everyone in vomit, fever, and near coma.  Remember those good old days? 

Alan Rudolph made a terrific film nearly three decades ago, called Welcome to L.A.  I keep waiting for his next really good one.  All that having been said, this could be an excellent trigger film for group discussions of marital strain and infidelities.  Grades: As a dramatic film: C+; as a realistic example of couple coping with marital crisis: B+ (05/04)

SECRETARY (Steven Shainberg, US, 2002). THEMES: "CLUSTER B" PERSONALITY DISORDER; HABITUAL SELF INJURY (CUTTING). Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as Lee, a glum, socially awkward, ritually self injuring woman who finds work as a secretary after release from a mental hospital. Her father is an alcoholic crank. Her mother (Lesley Ann Warren) is a gooney blonde who follows Lee around offering supercilious support. Her new boss (James Spader) is a weirdo attorney who acts more like an errant member of the Addams family, starring eerily at Lee, losing client files in the garbage. How any client could confide in him is beyond imagination. Everyone’s acting is strangely unnatural (the film hype calls it stylized). The story and characters move so bizarrely and badly that I quit watching after 25 minutes before the promised S&M aspects began. Grade: C- (07/04)

SECRETS AND LIES (Mike Leigh, UK, 1997, 136 min.). THEMES: FAMILY CONFLICT; MOTHER-DAUGHTER CONFLICT; FAMILY RECONCILIATION; ADOPTED ADULT CHILDREN SEEKING REUNION WITH BIRTH PARENTS. Leigh follows up his excellent 1989 film High Hopes, about the lives and aspirations of haves and have nots in London, a story built around a particular family, with an equally penetrating look here at the conflation of pretenses and unrevealed truths that subtly gnaw at the fabric of family life, with implications for the larger British society. Actors Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Brenda Blethyn, Timothy Spall and Claire Rushbrook all shine in this intense family melodrama. Ms. Jean-Baptiste is Hortense, a self sufficient London optometrist in her late 20s who, following the death of her adoptive mother, seeks her birth mother, Cynthia Purley (Ms. Blethyn), for the first time. What a surprise to them both when black daughter meets white mother!

Cynthia was 15 when she became pregnant, presumably during a one night stand in the hippie times of 1968, and she never even glimpsed the newborn before signing it away, even had forgotten the man. In fact, once over the shock, Cynthia is delighted to have good natured, respectful Hortense in her life, which is otherwise full of conflict and regret. She’s locked in battle with her other daughter Roxanne (Ms. Rushbrook), the issue of a later brief liaison, a surly 20 year old who is as high strung as Cynthia. They live together in an atmosphere of tightly wound acrimony and cigarette smoke in the old family rental house in SE London, a place that still has an outhouse in lieu of a proper loo.

Maurice (Mr. Spall), Cynthia’s brother, has made something of himself as a portrait and wedding photographer. He and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) live in a spiffy unattached suburban house, tricked out with three bathrooms, if you get the contrast to the house Maurice had grown up in. Maurice has his hands full with a booming business and a spouse made sad by 15 years of futile efforts to get pregnant. They drink a lot of wine. Maurice sees very little of his sister and niece, though he does provide Cynthia with cash to make ends meet from time to time, but he hopes to make amends when he and Monica host Roxanne’s 21st birthday party. Cynthia convinces Hortense to attend, but with the guise that she is a friend from the factory where Cynthia works. Roxanne brings along her current squeeze, Paul (Lee Ross), a nervous, quiet, but kindly chap who also chain smokes.

Things move along reasonably well until Cynthia, with too many glasses of wine aboard, announces that Hortense is in fact her other daughter. This news bulletin breaks the ice on a round of truth telling. Maurice confesses the marital barrenness that has burdened him and Monica. Monica declares her envy of Cynthia for having two daughters. It comes out that the money used by Maurice to buy the photography business was insurance proceeds from their father that belonged as much to Cynthia. Roxanne is devastated by her mother’s concealment of the story of Hortense. And so on. Maurice, aided by Paul, gets everyone to calm down and have a good cry. He laments that the three people he loves – Monica, Cynthia and Roxanne – can’t stand each other, and that “secrets and lies” have kept everyone apart. The final scene is a hopeful one: Hortense and Roxanne chat amicably in Cynthia’s little rear yard, then sit down for tea with her.

This film might have sunk into the bathos generated by Ms. Blethyn and Ms. Rushbrook, but their emotional excesses are marvelously countered by the presence of Ms. Jean-Baptiste, whose delightful mix of serenity, impishness, sadness and forbearance draws our attention to her whenever she is on camera. This permits Mr. Leigh to prevail in delivering his message that truth trumps deceit and is the proper cornerstone of love and reconciliation. It's good for families and might apply equally well to society at large. Grade: A- (03/05)

SECRETS OF A SOUL (Geheimnisse einer Seele) (Georg W. Pabst, Germany, 1926, 58 min). THEMES: PSYCHOTHERAPY; PSYCHOANALYSIS; HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT PSYCHFLICK. This is perhaps the earliest dramatized depiction of a psychoanalyst at work with his patient. Werner Krauss (who had played Dr. Caligari in the 1919 German classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) plays Martin Fellman, a chemist who develops a phobic fear of knives after a neighbor kills his wife with one. He eventually is treated by an analyst, Dr. Orth (Pavel Pavlov), who uses dream interpretation to assist Fellman in recovering memories of long repressed pathological jealousy from his childhood. Then a young girl preferred another boy to Fellman and gave him her doll. His rage about this reemerges when a handsome young man, his wife’s cousin, comes to visit. We see that all is not well even before the cousin arrives: there is no affection between the Fellmans, and their lack of children hints strongly of longstanding disaffection as well.

Frau Fellman’s delight in her cousin’s company stirs (unconscious) resentment in Martin, which takes the manifest form of sudden onset of fear of knives. The phobia “protects” him from acting on and even experiencing impulses to kill his wife, as the neighbor had done. All of this eventually is interpreted to Fellman by Dr. Orth, and as a result the phobia is resolved and everyone lives happily ever after. There’s even a baby for the Fellmans at the end. The story is melodramatic and the dynamics and cure are way too pat by today’s standards, of course. But this was a significant film given the early date of its release, and the prestige of its director and star. Two of Freud’s inner circle of analysts – Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs – collaborated in the development of the screenplay. Grades: Overall quality and content: C; historical significance: A (silent, with English intertitles) (06/05)

SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (Alan Pakula, US, 1988). THEMES: STRESSES OF DIVORCE WHEN THERE ARE CHILDREN; MAINTAINING TIES TO CHILDREN OF DIVORCE; REMARRIAGE, STEP-PARENTING; SURVIVORS OF SUICIDE; CHILDHOOD BEREAVEMENT. The Livingstones (Larry, a psychiatrist, and Jo, a celebrity fashion model) and the Goodwins (Peter, a successful concert pianist, and Beth, who’s homemaking) are two New York City families who seem to have it all: health, good looks, nice kids, fine careers. No, they don’t know each other. But Peter (David Dukes) develops a condition that prevents him from playing, and he ultimately commits suicide. At the same time, Jo Livingstone (Farrah Fawcett) cannot resist all the temptations for sex with other men that come her way, and Larry (Jeff Bridges) finally divorces her. A couple of years go by, and mutual friends introduce Larry to Beth Goodwin (Alice Krige), Peter’s widow. Turns out Larry and Beth have something intimate in common: they are prone to migraine headaches. One thing leads to another. They marry. Jo finds another man as well.

I wish I could say this is a good movie, but in fact it is a bore: poorly written, way too long, unimaginatively photographed, badly edited and lacking in continuity, especially in the first half hour. So I cannot recommend the film on cinematic grounds. What may make it useful are the contributions of two of the principals. Ms. Krige is highly believable as a tense, migrainous woman who is still grieving the death of her first husband. One gets through her a sense of the terrible legacy left behind for family when someone suicides. Mr. Bridges is almost always a joy to watch, and he does not disappoint here as a sweet, loving man. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see him working as a psychiatrist (you’ll have to see the film K-PAX for that). But we do see Bridges challenged as a father to maintain ties to his young children (who stayed with Jo) after divorce and remarriage, and at the same time challenged in a new role as stepfather two somewhat older kids who are still grieving the loss of their father, especially the son. These issues are not often examined in Hollywood films and are well dealt with here, though possibly things are too pat, too positive and tidy. Grades: drama: C; selected theme portrayals: B+ (12/04)

THE SELF-MADE MAN (Susan Stern, US, 2004, 58 min.). THEMES: AUTONOMY AT THE END OF LIFE; “RATIONAL SUICIDE.” Tough, maverick businessman Bob Stern made enough money in steel and real estate to retire at 37 and move to an isolated but sunny acreage not far from San Diego, where he installed a photovoltaic electrical system and proceeded to live off the grid with his family for the next 40 years, trying without success to promote alternative solar energy. A man born before his time. Antiauthoritarian, strong willed to a fault, a control freak, he reckoned all of life’s decisions on a careful cost benefit analysis. And then he got sick.

His daughter Susan has made a film of her father’s struggle over what to do about his health problems, using as the central footage a videotape he made for his daughters in the final days of his life, in which he sets forth his analysis of whether to submit to surgery or kill himself. She weaves other material around this footage: reflections of Bob’s friends and family members about the sort of person he was, and biographical information about him.

Of his choice of shooting himself to end his life, which he did at age 77, his son Mike puts it best when he says that his father must have decided, as in his business dealings, that he "was no longer a good investment and it was time to sell." There is a certain arbitrariness, even callousness, about Stern’s conduct at the end. The tape he made betrays a considerable degree of insensitivity in this man toward the feelings of his devoted wife and children. (There is also ample evidence that he was insensitive to many people throughout his life.)

His health problems, while formidable, were not necessarily life threatening: he had a recently discovered abdominal aortic aneurysm that needed surgical repair, and also had slowly developing prostatic cancer, apparently noninvasive and nonmetastatic. Otherwise, he seemed fit. He would not in any sense have qualified for physician assisted suicide under the Oregon law. The tape also suggests that he was neither depressed, demented or psychotic when he made his choice to die.

This film is troubling because Bob Stern, on tape, confronts not only his family but every viewer with his struggle and its discomforting resolution. He looks at each of us squarely in the eye. He raises tough questions about the proper limits of autonomy, the collision of interests of the individual and his or her family, and what to do about such conflicts. Stern appears to be so coolly rational about it all. Susan Stern wondered aloud at the Q & A whether, perhaps, her father was in the end not strong enough to face being weak.

Most of us don’t regard ourselves as self-made, in Stern’s mold. We understand the interdependencies with other people and circumstances that have shaped the course of our lives. We are social beings. No man is an island, John Donne said. Being so constructed, the question arises whether our assumed right to exercise complete individual autonomy is validly grounded. Ms. Stern commented in the discussion that there is a fine line between isolation and independence. One might add that there can also be a fine line between autonomy and selfishness. This is the stuff that Susan Stern’s film stirs in my thinking. And for that, it is a fine film. Grade: B+ (Seen at the 3rd AFI “Silverdocs” Festival) (06/05)

SET ME FREE (Lea Pool, Canada, 1999). THEMES: COMING-OF-AGE; SUPPORTIVE SIBLING RELATIONSHIP; DEPRESSION; SUICIDE ATTEMPTS. This fine film is possibly an autobiographical story about the director. Except for the beginning and end, it is set in Montreal, in 1963, and the subject is Hanna (Karine Vanasse), a 13 year old Quebecer girl, who is struggling to grow up. The film opens with evidence of her menarche while swimming during a summer visit to her maternal grandparents' farm. There is a tender scene there with Martin, an adult with Down Syndrome, who is her uncle. We know from these early scenes that the film will offer some refreshing perspectives.

Back home in Montreal, we meet Hanna's parents, who obviously love her, but they are hopelessly neurotic and self absorbed. The mother appears chronically depressed, and makes frequent half hearted suicide attempts with pills. Her father, a refugee Polish Jew, is a failed writer. Mother is the breadwinner, working as a seamstress. Hanna's slightly older brother is upbeat and supportive: he offers Hanna reliable companionship and empathy. But she longs, appropriately enough, for a relationship with her mother, who can offer Hanna nothing. In anger Hanna runs away from home and pretends to be a hooker, emulating her film heroine, Nana, in Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, which she has seen repeatedly.

There are good scenes involving a female classmate, and other scenes with her teacher, a vibrant, caring woman. Hanna finds some fulfillment with each of them, but clearly they cannot make up for her emotionally absent mother and "loser" father. Her mother is finally sent off to the psychiatric ward after another overdose, and then out to the grandparents' farm to recuperate. In the last scenes, summer has arrived again. Hanna's teacher lends her a movie camera to use over the long vacation. Hanna is enchanted by this, and we see footage she shoots of her mother, looking somewhat revitalized, when Hanna returns to the farm.

This film has substance and is very well crafted. It is beautifully photographed, the screenplay is coherent, the acting generally excellent. What it lacks, at least for me, is sufficient dramatic tension. I wonder if the problem perhaps could be that Vanasse's Hanna is so wonderfully self assured, so full of pluck, so redoubtable (her winning smile returns after each frustrating event or episode). She seems to lack vulnerability, and leaves too little room for doubt that she will prevail. (In French) Grade: B+ (02/00)

SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE (Steven Soderbergh, US, 1989) THEME: MARITAL INFIDELITY. A callous Yuppie lawyer's (Peter Gallagher) affair with his wife’s sister is exposed when his old buddy (James Spader) comes to town. Andie MacDowell is excellent as the wronged wife. Film took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Spader got the Cannes Best Actor award, and Soderbergh’s career was launched (he wrote as well as directed). Considered along with Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to be the two most influential indie films of the 90s. Grade: B+ (01/99)

SEXY BEAST (Jonathan Glazer, US/UK, 2001). THEME: ANTISOCIAL, EXPLOSIVE CRIMINAL PERSONALITY. "Gal" Dove (excellently played by Ray Winstone), has retired, after a successful criminal life in London, to a marvelous hacienda on the Costa del Sol. But he becomes unretired rather joltingly at the behest of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) who plays a truly crazy mean man - an asocial character who just plain has no feelings except rage, who intimidates everyone who refuses to do his bidding until they do. Logan comes to Spain to urge Dove to come back to London for another job. And Logan won't take no for an answer. Not that Logan had quite imagined precisely what circumstances might succeed in budging Dove, who wants to return to London to do a job about as much as Bill Clinton wants another date with Monica Lewinsky. The heist itself is dumb technically and lacks drama - quite a contrast to the job in The Score. But the head honcho of the crime - Teddy (Ian McShane) - is all serious menace. It's actually hard to get very interested in Dove or his wife and pals, or anyone else in this rather superficial and disappointing film. There is one spectacular scene, however, when a giant boulder rolls down a hill into Dove's swimming pool. Cool. Grade: Drama: B-; personality disorder portrayal: A- (08/01)

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (Peter Raymont, Canada, 2005, 91 m). THEMES: PTSD; MORAL ISSUES IN THE MILITARY. Roméo Dallaire, a French Canadian career soldier, a lieutenant general in the Canadian Army, was sent to head up the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in early autumn, 1993. (the sympathetic UN military officer portrayed by Nick Nolte in the film Hotel Rwanda is loosely based on Gen. Dallaire.) He stayed at his post through the 100 day genocidal disaster in the spring of 1994, unable to stem the slaughter of 500 to 800 thousand people (although his tiny force was responsible for saving about 25,000). He was psychologically devastated by this experience and suffered for several years from suicidal depression, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dallaire eventually retired from the army and has attempted more recently to put his life together again. This film, a documentary/memoir based on his 2003 book, “Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” is part of that effort.The film and book tell Gen. Dallaire’s personal story of Rwanda and its aftermath. For more details about the Rwandan tragedy, go to my other website, AtkinsonOnFilm.com, and access my review of this film under current cinema.

By the end of the genocidal slaughter, Dallaire had become almost unable to function, issuing orders and dictating memoranda that were incoherent, according to his executive assistant at the time, Major Brent Beardsley. This most likely represented some mixture of acute stress disorder and depression. But beyond that immediate period, Gen. Dallaire was broken by the Rwandan experience, blaming himself for not finding an approach that would have succeeded in mobilizing UN support from higher ups to prevent or stop the killings. For the next several years he suffered from prolonged depressive episodes and heavy drinking, and needed to be hospitalized at one point. Medications now stave off most depressive symptoms. But he continues to suffer from symptoms of PTSD: severe survival guilt and distressing, incessant images (flashbacks) of the carnage in 1994.

With his depression stabilized and his sobriety now restored (I infer the latter because he is the only one drinking orange juice at a recent reunion of his UN Rwanda staff shown in the film), Dallaire then wrote his memoir, entered into this film project and recently attended the 10th anniversary gathering in Kigali, honoring the dead and their surviving families. He was welcomed as a hero, a label he rejects, by the Rwandan President and addressed a crowd in the same stadium where his soldiers had sheltered 12,000 people 10 years earlier. Such steps can be seenn as excellent reparative efforts to reduce his residual guilt and proneness to depression.

Today, among other projects, Gen. Dallaire serves as a consultant to various entities concerned with preventing PTSD. This film is almost unique in portraying chronic stress disorder in a military leader, based at least in part on his sense of moral responsibility for not being able to do more. Rarely are high ranking officers willing to disclose so much publicly, even after retirement. Grade B (overall film quality); A- (for the unusual view of PTSD in a military leader. (10/05)

SHINE (Scott Hicks, Australia, 1996). THEME: SCHIZOAFFECTIVE DISORDER.  This biopic about the life of classical pianist David Helfgott is a near masterpiece. Helfgott, an obvious child prodigy, lost the years from age 23 to 37 to an unusual form of major mental illness, schizoaffective psychosis - with mixed features of schizophrenia and mania. His recovery was probably in part spontaneous and also attributable to the steady, loving support of Gillian, the woman he married shortly before his first recital in 14 years, in 1984. Helfgott has subsequently established a fine international career, touring five continents and creating best selling CDs. The Danes and Japanese especially love him (one Japanese composer has created a symphony with piano solo just for Helfgott). The film covers the time of his first childhood recitals to his 1984 return.

Three well chosen actors represent Helfgott as a child (Alex Rafalowicz), young adult before his illness (Noah Taylor), and as an older adult (Geoffrey Rush). Rush in particular is so creative, so incredibly skillful, that I was able to make the diagnosis from watching him, weeks before I could corroborate this fact. The sublime acting ensemble also includes Sir John Gielgud (David's first teacher in London), Lynn Redgrave (Gillian), and the incomparable Armin Mueller-Stahl. The conflict between David and his father is vastly interesting, though some viewers might conclude in error that schizoaffective disorder is simply the product of interpersonal conflict. It is not. People suffering from this illness show a strong family history of both schizophrenia and major mood disorders. This is an amazing story, authentically presented in this film (unlike the equally amazing story of John Nash that is inauthentically presented in A Beautiful Mind). For more on this film, see my article titled "Acting Just Like a Patient!" Grade A (06/02)

THE SHIPPING NEWS (Lasse Hallström, US, 2001). THEMES: STOIC, SHY, AVOIDANT PERSONALITY; COPING WITH LOSS AND ADVERSITY. Beautiful and faithful adaptation of the novel to film, about as good a job as is possible, rendering the look and feel of place, the quirky characters, the humor, and the sense of will and perseverance of the principal players. Kevin Spacey (Quoyle) and Julianne Moore (Wavey) give stellar performances, and there are several excellent supporting roles (Judi Dench as the Aunt, all the guys at the newspaper, the kids who play Quoyle's daughter and Wavey's son). Grade: A- (12/01)

SHOCK CORRIDOR (Samuel Fuller, US, 1963). THEMES: MALINGERING; PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL CONDITIONS. SPOILER ALERT! Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), the film’s protagonist, is an ambitious reporter who dreams of winning a Pulitzer prize by cracking the unsolved murder of an inmate at a public mental hospital. To accomplish this, he trains for a year to simulate a psychotic patient and thus gain admission to the hospital, coached by a psychiatrist hired by Barrett’s editor. Once inside, he gradually gains the confidence of three patients who had witnessed the murder. Along the way he is given medications and even endures electroshock therapy. Eventually he is able to expose the murderer, one of the ward attendants. But in the process, which takes months, Barrett experiences progressive unfeigned symptoms. In the most arresting scenes, he hallucinates a rainy deluge that floods the ward corridor and sweeps him helplessly along like a raging river. By the end he has become catatonic and inaccessible.

In their book, “Psychiatry and the Cinema,” Glen and Krin Gabbard refer to films like Shock Corridor as a subgenre of prison movies: lurid tales of involuntary institutions as tyrannical, punitive, inhumane places. Fuller’s hospital is a rough and tumble place, alright, where ECT is used as punishment, as it is in Milos Forman’s fictional drama, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, made a dozen years later. In my view, placing such films under the umbrella of prison exposes tends to obscure the fact that large public mental hospitals really were wretched places where mistreatment of the mentally ill was commonplace. These dramas and others like them (The Snake Pit, Shock Treatment) were in fact less harsh than the real thing, depicted by Frederick Wiseman in his documentary, Titicut Follies, about conditions in a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane, that debuted four years after Shock Corridor.

Fuller’s film is also a political movie, following a theme popular at the time: that insanity is a logical response to the pressures of an insane world. Each of the three witnesses to the murder became psychotic after enduring stresses related to important socio-political issues of the 1950s and early 60s. One had been a POW in the Korean War, brainwashed to speak out against the U.S.; returning home he couldn’t bear the guilt of this experience and now takes refuge in a fantasy world as a Confederate Civil War officer. Another had been the first African American admitted to a southern university; but he wound up on the ward an arch bigot, delusionally convinced he is white, inciting other inmates against the occasional black patient. The third was a scientist who had helped develop nuclear weapons and rockets for the space race, but he now acts as if he were an innocent young child, making simple drawings and playing kid games.

Lest you think that this film is all grinding grimness or irony, I should mention that there are amusing interludes as well, though the humor does play on ill informed notions about the mentally ill. At one point Barrett sneaks from one room into another, and finds himself surrounded by a phalanx of alarmingly feral women. “Oh, Oh…Nymphos!” he mutters, just before they attack him. He has a porcine roommate who sings opera and teaches Johnny a sure fire non-pharmaceutical treatment for insomnia: just stuff an entire pack of chewing gum into your mouth, chew until all your jaw muscles are thoroughly fatigued, and this brings on sleep.

How hard is it to simulate mental illness and gain access to treatment? Easy as pie. At least back when this film was made. It didn’t take a year’s training or intricate responses, contrary to Fuller’s script. Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan showed this in his notorious study, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” published in “Science” in 1973. Rosenhan and seven other “stooges” merely presented themselves for admission to various mental hospitals with the complaint that for three weeks they had heard a single voice that simply said “thud.” They were all admitted. Once inside, per plan, they behaved normally and said the voice had stopped. Aside from giving false names and not disclosing that they were research plants, they gave accurate personal histories to interviewers. They were kept on the wards an average of 19 days, often medicated (they were trained to cheek meds), and their diagnosis (always schizophrenia) was never questioned by staff. Actual patients, on the other hand, often figured out they were fakes. (Another psychologist, Lauren Slater, claims she replicated Rosenhan’s study more recently, after improvements in the DSM, with a similar outcome, except that this time outpatient drug treatment for depression was the typical response.)

Are people who fake mental illness for external gain vulnerable to actually developing such illnesses? There have been anecdotal reports from time to time to this effect, suggesting that the fabricated symptoms reflect imaginings derived from the patient’s unconscious vulnerabilities. Modern systematic studies do not support this notion, however. Surely there is something psychologically deviant about malingering. Not everyone does it, after all. Among those who do, there is at least a high likelihood of antisocial or histrionic personality disorder, and the presence of such a disorder does place a person at greater risk for faulty coping responses and consequent symptoms under stress. As for the form that trumped up symptoms take, the source of inspiration these days is more likely to be a checklist gleaned from USA Today, Oprah or the DSM-IV than the patient’s own imaginings. Grade: B- (07/04)

SHOT IN THE HEART (Agnieszka Holland, US, 2001). THEMES: CRIMINALITY; DEATH PENALTY; FAMILY CONFLICT; Made-for-TV (HBO) biopic based on a book by Mikal Gilmore, telling the story of the life and death of his oldest brother, Gary Gilmore, the first man executed for murder in 1977, after the US Supreme Court lifted a 10 year moratorium on the death sentence. The film focuses, as apparently did the book, on the encounters of these two estranged brothers in prison visits during the last week of Gilmore’s life. Mikal was a young child when Gary went his way, on a long, sordid criminal career that featured a sum of 22 years of incarceration. He came by his career honestly, son of a violent petty criminal, Frank (played in the film by Sam Shepard). Mikal (Giovanni Ribisi) and another older brother, Frank Jr. (Eric Bogosian) come to the prison to try to talk Gary (Elias Koteas) into relinquishing his demand to die. In fact Utah law permitted next of kin to petition for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Their mother wants this. Frank Jr. wants this. Mikal wants to do the right thing too, but feels torn between what the family wants and what Gary wants. Mikal and Gary are in fact strangers, and they spend the week getting acquainted in a series of taut, melodramatic encounters. Both Ribisi and Koteas are quite effective in these meetings, which are the main substance of the film (there are brief flashbacks to early family scenes, all effective and nonintrusive). The film is really quite gripping, though it ends badly with an anticlimactic, limp reading by Mikal from his book to an audience. Grade: B (12/02)

SHOWER (Xizao) (Zhang Yang, China, 2000). THEMES: DEATH & DYING; LOVING FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS; The passing of cultural traditions and the passing of an old man, and the effects of both on those who live on, are celebrated in this warmhearted, intimate film set in northern China. The prosperous elder son of a private bathhouse owner returns to visit his aging father and mentally retarded brother, after receiving a postcard from the brother on which he has created a drawing suggesting that their father is ill. There are many scenes in the bathhouse, frequented primarily by other old men, for most of the the young men are too busy now to while away the hours in pasttimes there (cricket fights, a form of checkers, tea, informal psychotherapy, temporary loans and general conversation, along with soaks and massage).

The companionship of the widower father and retarded son is a marvelous study of a mutual loving adaptation to meet the special needs of both men. They jog in Nike style sweatsuits each evening, and hold contests to see who can hold his breath underwater the longest. The older son, remote and subtly impatient at first, gradually opens himself emotionally to his father and brother, and this transformation is also beautifully rendered. A few scenes of life in rural arid northwest China serve to remind us of the scarcity and value of water to people from these remote areas, including the father, and help us understand how the watery urban bathhouse life could be experienced as almost miraculous to the old people who had known such scarcity. (In Mandarin) Grade: B+ (08/00)

SIDEWAYS (Alexander Payne, US, 2004). THEMES: DEPRESSIVE & NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITIES; MEN'S ISSUES; INTERDEPENDENT FRIENDSHIP. SPOILER ALERT! Here’s a highly amusing guyflick about two old college roomies, now 30-something, with a romantic subplot thrown in for good measure. Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is your basic restive, dysphoric Everyman. He’s dumpy, lonely and he scowls a lot. He teaches 8 th grade English in a San Diego middle school, and has spent years rewriting a sprawling novel that his agent cannot get a nibble for. Miles has been in therapy for two years since his wife divorced him and he takes Xanax and Lexapro. And he drinks too much. From the perspective of his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), none of this has helped. What will help, Jack sincerely believes, is for Miles to get laid this week.

The occasion is a trip the two have planned, driving up into the wine country of northern Santa Barbara county and beyond. This to celebrate Jack’s impending wedding the day after they return: it will be a moveable bachelor party. The itinerary call for golf, good food, and sampling fine wines. (Miles is a consummate wine nerd: he knows his structures and can detect the hint of asparagus in a cab as well as the strawberry and pepper.) Oh, yes, and getting laid – well, that’s on Jack’s agenda at least, his final fling. Miles could care less.

Jack, I should add, is about as opposite to Miles as can be; he’s a huge hunk of a fellow, a TV actor who’s on the early downslope of his career, formerly a regular in a couple of TV series, nowadays doing some commercials and voiceovers. He’s not the brightest bulb on the tree but he’s cheerful, sensitive and devoted to Miles. And he’s perniciously horny.

Before long Jack has arranged a double date (of course mum’s the word about Jack’s matrimonial plans). Miles is matched with Maya (Virginia Madsen), a recently divorced restaurant server he’s actually visited with on earlier trips to the wine country, and Jack himself is paired with Stephanie (Canadian actress Sandra Oh), a wine pourer who shares Jack’s carnal appetites. They are soon swept away in a rush of frenzied lovemaking, while Miles and Maya talk intensely about wines. Maya asks at one point why pinot noir is his favorite varietal, and when Miles rhapsodizes about the delicacy of the fruit, its sensitivity and need for constant nurturance, everyone including Maya knows that Miles’s talking about himself, not just grapes.

After a couple of days in the hay, Jack goes off the deep end, starts fantasizing about a different life here in wine country, living happily ever after with Stephanie and her little daughter. Miles rages at him, calls him (quite rightly) an infant, reminding him about his fiancée and the wedding a few days hence. Jack, for his part, is furious with Miles for drinking too much, pouting and glowering at every turn, and acting avoidant toward Maya, who obviously likes him. All true.

We see that these two guys are each as canny in their insights about one another as they are blind to their own foibles. They’re like two sides of the coin of narcissism: Jack is full of himself, the vain, self indulgent, would-be star who basks in admiration, like a kid in a candy shop with women, a gourmand, a guzzler of life. Miles on the other hand is supremely self critical, obsessive, finicky, always expecting the worst, a timid sniffer and sipper of life. He’s self denying when it comes to pleasure, but can also write a manuscript 8 inches thick, mainly about himself.

Things get rather madcap late in the week. Miles does rise beyond his negativity to have some intimate moments with Maya. But inevitably the secret of Jack’s wedding comes to light and Stephanie beats the bejesus out of him with her motorcycle helmet. Maya also feels deceived by this news and refuses further contact with Miles. The guys head back to San Diego on schedule, sadder for sure, but wiser? Who knows? Jack’s wedding takes place as planned. Miles returns to teaching. But then one day he gets a letter from Maya. In the final scene he comes knocking at her door up north. The picture fades to black.

SINCE OTAR LEFT  (Depuis qu’Otar est parti)  (Julie Bertucelli, France/Belgium, 2004). THEME: AN OLD WOMAN COPES INGENIOUSLY WITH LOSS OF HER SON. The Age of Psychotherapy has placed a high value on “transparency” – honest disclosures of our true inner feelings communicated to the people we care most about.  There’s plenty that’s good about this.  Unexpressed anguish and corrosive misperceptions can fester for years when families insist on conspiracies of silence.  But it’s also true that before the late 20th Century, people were more concerned with such equally important matters as saving face and sustaining social respectability, and were prepared to use deception, even big lies, in the service of protecting themselves and their loved ones from the gratuitous pain that “brutal” honesty can cause.  My mother, who died recently, 2 months short of her 99th birthday, could tell some real whoppers when she reckoned that this would subserve peacemaking in the family. 

One of my wisest teachers of psychotherapy once described a patient of his, a man who told his wife the intimate details of his extramarital sexual encounters and then wondered why she responded with anger.   After all, he said, he didn’t want to be sneaky, to hide anything from her.  Why couldn’t she appreciate his honesty?  My teacher finally interrupted him in the middle of one such story, saying indignantly to him, “My God, man, haven’t you the decency to lie?!”  Deception is a principal subtext in this marvelous inter-generational drama about three women who live in Tlibissi, capital of the Republic of Georgia: Eka the grandmother (Esther Gorintin, who didn't begin to act until age 85,in a wonderful turn here at age 90), her daughter Marina, and Marina’s daughter Ada.  (Ada’s father died during the Soviet-Afghan War.)  Eka’s beloved son, the apple of her eye, Otar (Marina’s brother, Ada’s uncle), a physician trained in Moscow, went to Paris in 2000, two years earlier, seeking a better life. 

Now Marina and Ada learn that Otar has died in an accidental fall.  They fear that news of his death will imperil Eka’s health, for she has a bad heart.  So Ada, against her better judgment, agrees to follow Marina’s dictates and forge letters from Otar as if life is moving along normally for him.  This works for several months, though Ada begins to feel more and more uncomfortable about the subterfuge and thinks her mother may be indulging her own needs more than Grandma’s.  Circumstances shift abruptly when Eka sells her father’s library of precious leather bound French books and uses the money to purchase tickets for all three women to visit Otar in Paris.  The outcome of their journey reflects not only the importance of saving face, but the depths of affection that paradoxically can inspire huge prevarications.

This tender story also shows how the dynamics of parent-child relationships can be passed along from one generation to the next. There's some humor along the way, including a great line delivered by Eka the eternal Communist, to the effect that she has proof that Stalin never murdered anybody. People in earshot can only roll their eyes.  The photography is inventive, and from time to time there are wonderful bursts of Georgian choral folk singing.  (In Georgian and French)   Grade: B+ (02/03)

SINGLES (Cameron Crowe, US, 1992). THEME: 20-SOMETHINGS LEARNING TO FORM RELATIONSHIPS. Crowe's second film (1989's Say Anything, also set in Seattle, was his first) about love and work among 20-somethings in Seattle. Like many romantic comedies, this one starts promisingly with a lot of laughs and movement, only to make the common, predictable turn toward serious love pangs and a jettisoning of funny stuff. In the end we are left with some degree of pathos for the ones who don't find love and sentimental warm feelings for those who do, but there is little fun in the final half. What goes up must come down in this formula. Too bad. Campbell Scott is excellent as Steve Donne, an idealistic urban planner who falls in love with Linda (Kyra Sedgwick). Sheila Kelley lends some energy as Linda's neighbor Debbie. Bridgett Fonda and Matt Dillon offer little spark as incompatible lovers. Grade: B (07/02)

THE SISTERS (Arthur Allan Seidelman, US, 2005, 85 m.). THEMES: ADULT SIBLING CONFLICTS;FAR-REACHING EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL TRAUMA. When the former assistant to a deceased eminent academic comes to pay his respects to the great man’s family, the visit stirs old, half hidden conflicts and triggers an avalanche of emotions in this overheated, theatrical drawing room drama based on Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Three Sisters.” (Richard Alfieri wrote the screenplay, which he adapted from his own updating of Chekhov’s play.) Maria Bello, Mary Stuart Masterson and Erika Christensen play, respectively, Marcia, Olga and Irene, the three Prior daughters.

Ms. Bello holds center stage most of the time, hurling one angry speech after another at just about anyone in shouting distance (though they’re all in one room). She is angry primarily because her father systematically abused her sexually as a child, second because Harry Glass (Steven Culp), the psychologist she married, has not been able to heal her deeply wounded personality, and, finally and most recently, because Vincent Antonelli (Tony Goldwyn), the visitor, a man she become instantly infatuated with, turns down her overtures and leaves. Her conduct is clinically authentic, insofar as she may suffer from a borderline personality disorder, a disorder often linked to a history of childhood sexual trauma. (Some authorities believe that BPD should be thought of as a post-traumatic personality disorder in such cases.)

Baby sister Irene turns her hostility inward, and galvanizes everyone’s attention by taking a large drug overdose. Andrew Prior (Alessandro Nivola), their brother, is angry too, but in sneakier fashion. He’s mad because his sisters bully him and dislike his fiancée/bride Nancy (Elizabath Banks), who’s also a nasty sort, someone deserving of the sisters’ contempt. Then there’s the incendiary social science professor, Gary Sokol (Eric McCormack), whose explosive behavior never ceases. Sokol’s mad because Irene prefers another suitor, Sokol’s erstwhile buddy, philosophy professor David Turzin (Chris O’Donnell), who doesn’t seem to be mad at anyone. Olga, a bleak, unfulfilled Lesbian, at least keeps her unhappiness contained. She is the most dignified member of the family.

Somehow the veteran actor Rip Torn got himself inserted into this literal madhouse as old Professor Chebrin. And while Mr. Torn has been memorably hostile in some of his films (he’s played gangsters, tough soldiers, tougher cops, Richard Nixon and even Judas Iscariot among 165 roles spanning a 50 year career), he’s quite the good humored, sanguine fellow here, almost alone as a source of equanimity in these proceedings.

The director, Mr. Seidelman, has made nearly 70 films, but almost all for television. This may explain the soap operatic, way overacted, tone of this movie. You’ve got to shout it out to be heard above the din of family life on the boob-tube. But the clamor of this film is ratcheted up way too much for pleasurable viewing on the big screen. (The IMDb says this film is 113 minutes long, so somewhere along the line 28 minutes got cut to create the version I viewed. Probably a good thing.) Grades: C for drama, B for depiction of sibling conflicts and effects of childhood sexual trauma on adult personality. (04/06)

THE SIXTH SENSE (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999).THEME: CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK. Bruce Willis in a subdued role as an empathic child psychologist challenged by a young boy who is terrified, has disturbing visions, and develops inexplicable injuries. There seems to be something ominously supernatural afoot. We could talk more about it, but then the suspense would be ruined for you. Grade: B+ (12/99)

SLING BLADE (Billy Bob Thornton, US, 1996, 135 min.). THEMES: ADULT WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITY (AUTISM?); MORAL CONUNDRUM WITHOUT A CLEAR ANSWER. SPOILER ALERT! Karl Childers is a man who has spent 25 years in a public mental institution since he intentionally murdered his mother and her lover, when he was just 12 years old, after witnessing them making love. Now his commitment is up and he must return to the outside world, something he is most reluctant to do. The film traces his experiences after his release. This film is an astonishing tour de force by Mr. Thornton, who conceived of the lead character, wrote a play for the stage and performed the role of Karl in it, then adapted his script for the screen, directed and starred again as Karl in this film.

Karl is clearly not a normal individual. But the diagnosis is not an easy one. We learn that he has always been considered to be mentally retarded, and that he was tormented in school by other kids because he was different, and that his parents made him live in a separate shack at the rear of the property with a dirt floor and a hollowed out hole to sleep in. His posture is stooped and he walks with a peculiar, stiff gait. He speaks in a strangely mechanical, flat manner, makes stereotypical grunts and gestures, constantly wrings his hands. He typically does not speak unless spoken to, and not always even then. Yet he seems to enjoy the company of some people, especially a young boy, Frank Wheatley (Lucas Black), who befriends him the day he returns to his hometown after release from the hospital.

He almost always accepts invitations to spend time with other kindly adults as well. He is gifted in his capacity to diagnose and repair small engines, to the delight of an engine repair shop owner who agrees to take him in. There are other signs now and then of Karl’s shrewdness in sizing up social situations. Karl is of course an invention of Mr. Thornton’s imagination and, from an artistic viewpoint, need not conform to any clear cut clinical syndrome. I would say that the best diagnostic fit would be a high functioning person with autism, i.e., Asperger Syndrome.

Besides Karl’s basic disability, his character has been shaped by spending 25 years in what sociologists have called a “total institution” – where some patterns of eccentric and maladaptive behavior occur as the result of the drab, regimented and dependent life people live in such places (the British social psychiatrist John Wing called this condition “institutionalism.”) Life in these human warehouses does breed dependency, and persons placed in the community after meny years may not be able to cope and desire to return to the hospital.

Among the adult friends Karl makes are Frank’s mother Linda (Natalie Canerday) and her close chum Vaughan (John Ritter), a gay man. Karl moves from a room behind the mechanic’s shop to the Wheatley home, at Linda’s invitation. His encounters with some others do not go so well. He has a brief reunion of sorts with his estranged father (Robert Duvall), who disowned him after the murders years ago and disowns him again now. Worst of all is Doyle (Dwight Yoakam), Linda’s alcoholic, predatory boyfriend, a seriously nasty, insulting individual who frequently menaces Frank and Linda. Karl becomes concerned that Doyle will do violent harm to the Wheatleys and so he calculatingly kills Doyle one evening, then turns himself in to authorities. This of course results in his return to the hospital, no doubt for good this time around.

The moral conundrum with which Karl and film viewers are confronted here is well wrought. Doyle is highly likely to kill or permanently injure little Frank, perhaps Linda too. Karl, in spite of some obvious satisfaction he has found in a few key relationships, is still a fish out of water living in the town and from this perspective has little to lose by sacrificing his freedom as the price of killing Doyle.

THE SNAKE PIT (Anatole Litvak, US, 1948). THEMES: PSYCHODYNAMIC MODEL OF SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESS; PSYCHOANALYSIS; PSYCHOTHERAPY; PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK; THE PUBLIC MENTAL HOSPITAL AT MID-CENTURY. This melodramatic film is historically important for its nuanced depiction of psychiatry near the mid-20 th Century. Several subtexts are explored: the protagonist’s illness and her care using the mental hospital and conventional physical treatments of the day; the psychological explanation of her illness and her more definitive recovery through psychodynamic psychotherapy, working with a skillful psychiatrist; the chaotic state of public psychiatric institutions at the time; and the pressures on staff to move patients through the system with only superficial care because of crowding and inadequate funding. The image in the film’s title derives from an alleged archaic practice in which mentally ill persons were thrown into a pit of snakes as a sort of shock therapy to provoke their survival skills and thus restore their sanity. The screenplay is based on a book by Mary Jane Ward, published in 1946, in which she gave a partly fictionalized account of her experience of mental illness and hospital treatment in the early 1940s.

Olivia de Havilland stars here in an Oscar-nominated role as Virginia Stuart Cunningham, an aspiring novelist who develops a severe psychotic illness soon after marrying. As the film opens, we meet Virginia on the grounds of the state mental hospital where she has been incarcerated for several months. Then, in a long flashback narrated by her husband Robert (Mark Stevens), as he is interviewed by her psychiatrist, we learn about their on-again, off-again courtship, marked by Virginia’s ambivalence about marrying and her more generally unpredictable temperament: strong, witty and confident sometimes, insecure, dependent and frightened at others. Now, in the hospital, she is most definitely psychotic. She is prone to paranoid delusional suspicions and hears disembodied voices coming from the spaces behind her back. At other moments she seems quite rational and makes friends. Perhaps she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, but it’s not clear cut. Against this diagnosis is her tendency to forget things and misidentify familiar people like Robert or suspect imposters (not common in schizophrenia, more common in people simulating psychosis). She also seems fixated on certain specifics, like the date “May 12,” suggesting some hidden, possibly traumatic or symbolic element that could explain her condition. Or so it seems to her psychiatrist, Dr. Kik (English actor Leo Genn). But Virginia will not reveal anything to him, apparently too terrified to do so.

After five months of getting nowhere, Dr. Kik (short for his unpronounceable multisyllabic middle European surname) finally gives Virginia a short course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – just enough, he hopes, to help mobilize her capacity to make contact, to talk with him. Sure enough: after just four treatments they have a meaningful session in which she seems to experience a cathartic reenactment of some earlier traumatic event on May 12. Later Dr. Kik gives her sodium amytal (the old “truth serum”) to aid her catharsis. In her further flashbacks, the story gradually comes together. It’s a classic Freudian oedipal situation with added twists of guilt. As a youngster, Virginia was daddy’s girl. But at a developmentally pivotal time, when she was about 4, Dad began to take Mother’s side in disciplinary disputes, and Virginia felt betrayed and enraged. We see her in one flashback decapitating a male doll who stands for her father. Shortly after this event Dad developed a terminal illness and Virginia blamed herself. Subsequently, she never dated boys as a teenager, and later, in adulthood, she became convinced that she could not love any man. Meaning that for her, all men are equated with her father, and thus forbidden as objects of adult love. She did grow platonically close to one, an older man who reminded her of her father, but she panicked when he proposed marriage. It was the day of his proposal, May 12, while driving in his car, that her acute anxiety distracted him, causing the accident in which he died. When she finally married Robert, also a good and caring man like Dad, she experienced a complete breakdown. “I thought [being married to Robert] was wrong somehow,” Virginia says, “I was afraid.” Over time, as all of these details fall neatly together, Virginia’s symptoms recede.

But it isn’t easy. For one thing, there’s Nurse Davis (Helen Craig), an archly sinister woman who has a crush on Dr. K. She resents his attentions to Virginia, and tries her best to retaliate, for example, trying to work Virginia in for some extra ECT. There’s also a loathsome supervising psychiatrist – a fat, cigar chomping, in-your-face sort. He wants Virginia discharged, prematurely in Dr. Kik’s opinion, justifying his stand because of crowded conditions, though he seems motivated more by prejudice against Dr. Kik’s notions about the usefulness of psychotherapy. This fellow provokes Virginia at a pre-discharge staff conference, which she ends by biting the finger he is shaking in her face, we later learn, and for that she gets to stay on at the hospital, a serendipitous occurrence. The hospital itself is drab enough (actual back wards at the Camarillo State Hospital north of Los Angeles were used as a shooting location). And the wards are crowded. There’s no privacy. One ward is quite chaotic, noisy with the din of poorly controlled, acting out patients.

All of that said, the hospital portrayed here is actually a pretty nice place. More lurid scenes would reach the big screen in mental hospital exposẽ films that followed, in the 1960s and later, films like Shock Corridor, Titicut Follies, Frances, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Film codes were such in 1948 that we are spared from actually seeing Virginia convulse when they turn on the electricity. For that matter, it seems exceptional that ECT was employed so judiciously for Virginia. State hospital patients in that era typically received dozens, sometimes hundreds, of such treatments. We don’t even get to see her bite the piggish psychiatrist who taunts her at the discharge staffing. All the wards seem clean and orderly but one. The patients generally are civil and alert, not drugged or spacey. The grounds are lovely. There’s an upbeat coffee shop where visitors come. A patient dance party near the end is at least as decorous as a junior high dance. And when we are swept out the front door with Virginia, when she finally is discharged, aglow in her apparent recovery, it is easy enough for us to leave behind all the other patients who aren’t getting psychotherapy or moving forward in life. It’s a highly sanitized presentation all around.

The notion that psychotic disorders are likely to arise from lack of nurturance during early life, or from psychological conflicts or traumas later in childhood or in the years beyond – all mechanisms suggested in Virginia’s case – reflects the ascendance of the psychoanalytic perspective in American psychiatry in the years following World War II. Today, although we still recognize that reactive and psychogenic psychoses can and do occur, we consider the cause of most disorders like Virginia’s to be an interaction between genetic vulnerability and influential life events. Leo Genn’s Dr. Kik is an exemplary psychotherapist. He is reliable, even tempered, candid in his responses, warmly empathic, curious but not pushy, engaging but not overly familiar. He does come across as paternalistic, even indulgent at times, but that would be appropriate for anyone hoping to establish rapport with a regressed, terrified, distrustful patient. Whatever the cause of her condition, Virginia needs to learn in therapy that she can have a positive, constructive, trustworthy relationship with a man whom she does not equate with her father. This is the transferential bridge back to realistic reengagement with her husband.

It is, on the other hand, highly unrealistic to suggest that a large underfunded public mental hospital in any era would have sufficient psychiatric staff to enable intensive individual psychotherapy to be conducted for any patient, as occurs in this film. Such treatment – then and now - is only available in private hospitals at great expense. The only exceptions in the past were public hospitals designated as training sites for psychiatrists and psychologists, where a few carefully selected patients might be assigned for supervised psychotherapy, for learning purposes. So it is odd in this film, incongruous, to have Virginia shuttling back and forth between the enlightened, sophisticated proceedings of her psychotherapy and the primitive conditions of her captivity on the ward, however well sanitized. To their credit, the filmmakers do establish that there are not sufficient resources to provide proper psychological treatments for patients who might benefit, and this was 15 years before the community mental health movement got seriously underway.

(Trivia item: Actress Betsy Blair gives a splendid uncredited cameo as Hester, a mute, psychotic woman whose unblinking eyes are supercharged with lunacy. It is an arresting performance, comparable to Robert Duvall’s Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Ms. Blair went on to marry Gene Kelly, and later starred as Ernest Borgnine’s girlfriend in the award-winning Marty. She was blacklisted by Sen. Joe McCarthy and moved to England, where she married again, to film director Karel Reisz.) (Film seen most recently in November, 2004). Grades: drama: C+; psychiatric themes:A- (11/04)

SNOW ANGELS (David Gordon Green, US, 2007, 106 m.). [NOTE: I missed the first 25 minutes, saw the last 81 m. (76%); I think I saw enough to permit a fair review and grading of this film.] THEMES: DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES; DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; INFIDELITY. All of the usual suspects appear in the lineup of this ultraformulaic contemporary domestic psychflick: family dysfunction, alcoholism, infidelity, domestic violence, betrayal of friends, child custody battles, and three unnatural deaths caused by different means. It’s all so over-the-top that, were it not for everybody’s earnestness, you might mistake this psychodrama for satire. Writer/Director David Gordon Green chose to adapt Stewart O'Nan's novel for this film, and maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. His own original screenplay guided his earlier and much better film, All the Real Girls. Dubiously titled since it is in fact a first rate guyflick, Real Girls is a bittersweet and richly realistic story of a recognizable group of southern small town high school pals now in their mid-twenties and, to borrow a phrase, still crazy after all these years.

There’s only one rational couple in Snow Angels, and they are adolescents in the heat of first love: Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby), whose scenes together provide the only real substance to this movie. Oh, yes, there’s also one sane adult, Arthur’s mother, Louise (Jeanetta Arnette), but we seldom see her. The other adults are bonkers, though the actors do their bathetic turns well enough (Kate Beckinsale, Griffin Dunne, Nicky Katt, Sam Rockwell and Amy Sedaris – David S.’s kid sister). Filmed in a small town in Nova Scotia. Grade: B. (02/21/08)

Add: Filmmaker David Gordon Green and his adolescent star Michael Angarano (Arthur) were both present at this screening. There was much talk about dialogue. Green's scripts are distinctive for the simplistic realism of the actors' lines. He says that he writes a script and has his cast first go through it adhering to what’s written. Then they go through it again, this time ad libbing in character. The final product is something of a Hegelian synthesis, scripted bits dotted with ad libs, he says. The result is, hopefully, something fresh. ‘In the end who cares what’s written on a scrap of paper,’ to paraphrase Green’s reference to the shooting script. Angarano says of Green’s approach that usually the cast more or less automatically reverted to primarily using the scripted dialogue. Green says he shrinks away whenever someone recommends a “clever” script for his review, because he knows this means “clever” dialogue that may play well on the page but will be unsatisfactory (i.e., too complex, to unlike real ‘talk’) on screen. [My take: the dialogue in Real Girls is especially noteworthy for its realistic simplicity, maybe more so than Angels.]

SOLAS  (Alone)  (Benito Zambrano, Spain, 1999).  THEME: COPING WITH LONELINESS. This is a marvelously inventive and touching film about loneliness and the surprising opportunities that can ease the pain of this experience. Maria is a hardened woman in her mid 30s who lives alone, works as a charwoman, drinks too much, and has just discovered she is pregnant by an uncaring truck driver who wants her only for sex. In the midst of all of this, Maria's father becomes ill and must come from his village to the city for surgery. He is a nasty lout who has always treated his wife, Rosa, and his daughters abusively (Maria had fled the family home as a teenager, and her father still will not speak to her). Rosa, a longsuffering, generous and tender woman, comes along and moves in with Maria. Rosa tries to add some note of cheer to Maria's drab rooms, bringing home plants, salvaging a rocker and cooking decent food, between visits to her husband's hospital bedside, where he verbally abuses her whenever he is not sleep. A neighbor, an old man who lives with his German Shepherd dog, Achilles, offers companionship to Rosa, inviting her in for tea. She fixes him a meal or two, and once helps him when he has been ill. They become obviously fond of each other, and both are sad when Rosa must return with her husband to their village.

Maria, who has reacted ambivalently to her mother's presence again in her life, also misses her once she has left. A moving scene follows Maria's gaze around her kitchen, from one plant to another, and to the empty rocker where her mother always had sat. The film might have ended here. Instead, the old neighbor man transfers his attention to Maria. He coaxes her to confide her troubles to him. She really wants to keep the baby, but thinks she should have an abortion, partly because she fears she will be an abusive mother (her truck driver sex partner has accused her of being inadequate to be a mother - conveniently for him, since he favors the abortion - and her mother always has told her she has a bad temper like her father's). The neighbor man says the opposite, that he sees good and kindness in her, and he makes an incredible proposition to her: that he become the "adoptive grandfather" of her child, live with her and help her with expenses and so on. She is shocked, thinking at first that he is merely toying with her, or worse, but he persuades her of his seriousness and that he has her bests interests at heart. And so these two find an unusual solution for their separate plights in an ending that is fresh and completely consistent with their characters. There is never a false note throughout this fine, well acted, well photographed film, moving at an even, unhurried pace that never drags or cuts corners. (In Spanish) Grade: A (02/00)

THE SOLDIER’S TALE (Penny Allen, France/US, 2007, 52 min.). THEMES: PTSD (ANXIETY DISORDERS); IMPACT OF MENTAL ILLNESS ON THE FAMILY (FAMILY); DIVORCE (RELATIONSHIPS); POST-TRAUMATIC PERSONALITY CHANGES (PERSONALITY DISORDERS); WAR (SOCIAL & LEGAL ISSUES). In 2004, Penny Allen, an American narrative filmmaker who has lived and worked in Paris for the past 15 years, was flying home to Portland, Oregon, because of her mother’s death. By chance, her adjoining seatmate was a soldier, an Army Sergeant, who was returning home on leave at the midpoint of his 12-month deployment in Iraq (he is referred to only as “Sgt. R.”) They struck up a conversation about Sgt R’s experiences in Iraq. Subsequently, and unexpectedly to Ms.Allen, he sent to Paris many still photos and a video entitled “War is Hell” filmed by Sgt. R and a number of his soldier buddies during their tour of duty. He expressed to Ms.Allen his hope that she would use the material to increase public awareness of the awful nature of war.

Moved by her encounter and the visual material, some of it disturbingly graphic, Ms. Allen set forth to film a documentary for French television. To complement the in-country material, she also conducted and filmed a five hour interview with Sgt. R, about a year after his return. The result is The Solder’s Tale, a brief (52 minute), balanced, apolitical and entirely arresting story about the rigors of insurgency and counterinsurgency combat, spanning not only the uncertainty of survival and the anguish of loss and maiming of lives, but also the exhilaration and lure that soldiering can elicit. The difficulties coming home, including marital disruption, and clear signs of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are also addressed.

A SONG FOR MARTIN (Bille August, Sweden, 2002). THEME: ALZHEIMER'S DEMENTIA.  Remarkable account of love in the autumn of life for Martin, an acclaimed composer, and Barbara, concertmistress of the Stockholm Symphony. All too soon, however, their marriage is torn asunder when Martin develops Alzheimer's Disease. Real life partners, the actors Sven Wollter and Viveka Seldahl, deliver fine performances. Wollter's impression of an Alzheimer's patient is clinically perfect. He gets right the vacant stare and stiff, leaden movements often seen in Alzheimer's. Seldahl insightfully demonstrates the anguish and longsuffering of the spouses of Alzheimer's patients everywhere. But clinical authenticity is not enough to guarantee a first rate drama. (The recent film Iris, on the other hand, achieves greater dramatic impact by weaving the story of Iris Murdoch's dementia within a larger dramatic context of a lifelong relationship in which her husband's solicitous concern for her is balanced against her self-+absorbed freedom of spirit. (In Swedish) Grades: (for dramatic values): B; (for clinical authenticity): A (02/02)

THE SON'S ROOM (Nanni Moretti, Italy, 2002). THEME: BEREAVEMENT.  A psychoanalyst and his genuinely happy family are devastated when their teenage son drowns in a diving accident. Their grief is palpable yet gently displayed, aided by a pensive musical score.  Months later, a brief interlude with the son's girlfriend and her new beau helps the family regain some lightness to carry on. Surprising touches include the father's grief-driven, mad roller coaster ride. For much more on this film, see my article, "Rooms in the House of Grief." (In Italian) Grade: A (02/02)

THE SOPRANOS(David Chase, 1999-2003). THEMES: ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY; PANIC DISORDER; PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK. It is rare for me to include any television production in these reviews. However, this series provides the best and most detailed look at psychiatric office practice ever filmed. One of very few instances where a female psychiatrist conducts herself ethically, resisting boundary transgressions. For detailed review, see my article entitled "Treating Tony Soprano." Grade: A (2001, 2002, 2003)

SOUTHERN COMFORT (Kate Davis, US, 2001). THEMES: LIFE AND LOVE EXPERIENCES OF TRANSGENDER ADULTS; DEATH & DYING. Sensitive, highly effective documentary about the lives and loves of several middle aged transsexual people who live in the rural hills of Georgia, of all places. Far from the intense adolescent tumult of young Brandon Teena’s life (The Brandon Teena Story; Boys Don’t Cry), Robert Eads’s story follows a very different path. Eads, a 52 year old wizened, goateed, self styled cowboy, lives alone in a single wide in the woods, a place he calls his farm. Born Barbara into a middle class family, Eads has done it all. As a woman he married and raised two sons, one of whom we meet. It’s more than a little disorienting when he calls the flinty, chain smoking Robert, “Mom.”

Although he had regarded himself as a man trapped in a genetically female body since childhood, it was only about a decade ago that Robert transitioned (outed) into a full time, through-and-through male role. He had breast amputations and began taking male sex hormones, but chose to forgo any genital surgeries. When we meet him in the spring of his final year of life, Robert has reached the threshold of a severe, if ironic, fate. He’s got an inoperable cancer of his internal genitalia (it isn’t clear to me whether it’s a uterine or ovarian tumor). The film follows his odyssey through the final months, surrounded by his friends. Most notable among them is Lola Cola, born a male, who has transitioned to become a woman. They met years earlier at a conclave in Atlanta called “Southern Comfort,” an annual regional gathering of transsexuals that offers support, guidance, and opportunities for networking.

Lola and Robert have only lately fallen in love, and one of the film’s great virtues is that the couple are able to inform us about their love, which has moved beyond simple sexual interest into a much deeper and more embracing intimacy. We also meet Max, a younger, somewhat feisty transsexual (genetic female) who is married to the ivory skinned transsexual Cori (genetic male), and still another couple, transsexual Cas (genetic female) a stocky, rugged machinist, who is married to Stephanie, a straight woman. We share their stories and hurts about stigma and rejection. We learn of Robert’s and Max’s estrangements from their families of origin.

At a time when he was suffering major uterine bleeding from his cancer, Robert was denied medical care by multiple hospitals and gynecologists because of his gender orientation. Stephanie worries that this film will bring ostracism or worse into everyone’s lives. We hear about the difficulty of finding competent surgeons for plastic procedures, and the consequences of choosing poor operators; the pros and cons of surgery to create a penis in transsexual males. Robert articulates his skepticism about whether sex-preoccupied Max is capable of intimacy. We visit the last Southern Comfort meeting Robert will be able to attend, where he and Lola lead a seminar on intimacy and Robert gives an after dinner address wearing a tuxedo, and dances with Lola at the annual dress ball, shortly before his death.

SPELLBOUND  (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1945)  THEME: HYPNOTHERAPY TREATMENT OF MAN WITH POST-TRAUMATIC AMNESIA; PSYCHOANALYTIC THEMES.  Film offers an especially corny psychoanalytic tale but is noteworthy for being among the first films to build a story around a psychotherapy relationship and for its early deviation from conventional gender arrangements. This film overly dramatizes the powers of a psychotherapist (Ingrid Bergman) to heal a man (Gregory Peck) who suffers from a post-traumatic dissociative disorder, but no real effort is made to depict therapy realistically, and the couple cross the line into romance.  Called by Hitchcock, himself, "just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis," Spellbound arrived at a time (1945) when psychoanalysis was in the first flushes of its 40 year run as the dominant force in American psychiatry. See also my article titled, “Freud’s Far Reach on Film” for more information on this movie.  Grade: B- (01/98)

SPIDER  (David Cronenberg, Canada/UK, 2003).  THEMES: SCHIZOPHRENIA; MATRICIDE. SPOILER ALERT!   Spider tells the story of Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes), who is disabled by severe chronic schizophrenia; the story links his present dysfunctional condition to circumstances when he was a pre-teen.  Placed in a public mental hospital when quite young, as the film opens he is being outplaced in a re