Perhaps a companion piece to A Dangerous Method, the 2011 drama about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, this focuses on Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), the French neurologist who was a mentor to Freud. But that was later on; this movie depicts his earlier work with female “hysterics.” Actually, it almost exclusively focuses on his work with one female patient. Augustine (Soko), a 19-year-old maid, is taken to Charcot’s clinic at the start of the film and quickly becomes a kind of star patient, suffering as she does from dramatic seizures that can be reproduced under hypnosis, as well as minor paralyses. the doctor pokes her, prods her, and uses her as the main attraction in his lectures.
The movie, a first feature by its writer-director, Alice Winocour, and Lindon do a good job portraying Charcot as an exemplar of the imperious doctor as authority figure a century before anyone spoke of “patient-centered” care. It does a decent job portraying his patient, who develops a symbiotic relationship with her doctor in which he is savior, denier, father figure, and perhaps more. It does hardly any job at all placing Charcot into the patheon of medical pioneers, not even bothering with the usual typed epilogue typically found at the end of biographical movies. Although making it clear that some thought Charcot to be a quack, on the strength of the movie it’s hard to tell whether he’s a good scientist, and impossible to tell whether he helps his patients. Besides Augustine, the others are portrayed only briefly, mostly in interview segments meant to illuminate the variety of mysterious ailments that fell under the “hysteria” rubric. The only other significant character in the movie is Charcot’s wife (and perhaps his pet monkey).
This movie generally held my interest, but Charcot was too aloof a character (and Augustine not complex enough) to have pulled me in emotionally, and the lack of a broader historical perspective on this medical pioneer, or on the hysteria phenomenon of the 1800s, was frustrating.
IMDb link
viewed 6/27/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/27/13
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Friday, June 21, 2013
Friday, September 14, 2012
The Master (**1/2)
Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia), is one of
the few director of whom it can be said both that he brings a
distinctive sensibility to all his films, yet makes films distinctly
different from each other. A common element is the presence of a
character pushed to his limit, often along with a larger-than-life
character who pushes him there. That was the case with There Will Be Blood,
set in the early days of the oil business, and is in the film, set in
mostly in the first years of the 1950s. Pushed to his limits is Freddy
Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a drifter, alcoholic, sex-obsessive, and World War II veteran who literally wanders into the orbit of larger-than-life Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Said to be inspired by the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Dodd is a man bold enough to introduce himself as a “writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all…a man.” The Dodd we encounter in this film has already coalesced into his final form as a guru, though. His philosophies, gathered in a book called The Cause, are an admixture of simple mind-over-matter pronouncements — “man is not an animal” —and metaphysical gobbledegook. His own son says that he “makes hit up as he goes along,” but his second wife (Amy Adams) seems simultaneously to be a true believer and to understand that “The Cause,” as it is called in the movie, is a self-creation. Assistant, partner, moral compass, power behind the throne, and more, this character intrigues in Adams’s relatively few scenes. Though we aren’t meant to take the Cause seriously, and it’s doesn’t seem that Dodd is truly sinister (so the movie is no exposé), the ways such men seduce their followers seems to me an inherently fascinating subject.
Unfortunately, the way Anderson explores this subject is through the lens of the film’s primary protagonist, Quell called a “scoundrel” by Dodd but nonetheless an object of indulgence, curiosity, and attention for him. Quill is not likable; he is not impressive; he is not a villain; he is not even particularly complex; he is alienating rather than charismatic, as the Daniel-Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood was charismatic. In short, he is a difficult, unpleasant character to follow for two and a half hours. Though I gather that we are supposed to become involved in his efforts to overcome the darker parts of his nature, and the efforts of Dodd and, to a lesser extent, his followers, I did not find myself absorbed by this quest, though individual scenes between the two of them, which often are like a strange kind of therapy, are intense and well done. I will also concede that Phoenix’s portrayal is consistent and skillful, even down to his odd posture, and my reaction to the character, that he seems incredibly creepy and repellent, subjective, as was my feeling that Phoenix seemed too old to portray the character. (A subplot is Quell continuing longing for a girl he knew when she was 16; it’s unclear how old Quell is supposed to have been when he knew her, but the flashback scenes make no attempt to make Phoenix look younger. Also, the plot fits better if we assume Quell was about 20, not 30 or so, when he courted the girl and went off to join the Navy. But Quell/Phoenix looks too old to have been 20 around 1941.)
In a way, figures like Dodd (or Hubbard) represent the seemingly very American ability to turn imagination, even an amalgamation of psychobabble and pseudoscience, into reality. No doubt it’s unfair of me to want the movie to be Elmer Gantry, i.e. more about the spiritual leader as huckster. No doubt Anderson is a very skillful filmmaker. His camerawork, especially in shooting wide vistas, is memorable, and there is an intensity he brings to his storytelling. But, no doubt, I found The Master only intermittently spellbinding.
IMDb link
viewed 11/14/12 5:15 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 11/15–11/17/12
Said to be inspired by the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Dodd is a man bold enough to introduce himself as a “writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all…a man.” The Dodd we encounter in this film has already coalesced into his final form as a guru, though. His philosophies, gathered in a book called The Cause, are an admixture of simple mind-over-matter pronouncements — “man is not an animal” —and metaphysical gobbledegook. His own son says that he “makes hit up as he goes along,” but his second wife (Amy Adams) seems simultaneously to be a true believer and to understand that “The Cause,” as it is called in the movie, is a self-creation. Assistant, partner, moral compass, power behind the throne, and more, this character intrigues in Adams’s relatively few scenes. Though we aren’t meant to take the Cause seriously, and it’s doesn’t seem that Dodd is truly sinister (so the movie is no exposé), the ways such men seduce their followers seems to me an inherently fascinating subject.
Unfortunately, the way Anderson explores this subject is through the lens of the film’s primary protagonist, Quell called a “scoundrel” by Dodd but nonetheless an object of indulgence, curiosity, and attention for him. Quill is not likable; he is not impressive; he is not a villain; he is not even particularly complex; he is alienating rather than charismatic, as the Daniel-Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood was charismatic. In short, he is a difficult, unpleasant character to follow for two and a half hours. Though I gather that we are supposed to become involved in his efforts to overcome the darker parts of his nature, and the efforts of Dodd and, to a lesser extent, his followers, I did not find myself absorbed by this quest, though individual scenes between the two of them, which often are like a strange kind of therapy, are intense and well done. I will also concede that Phoenix’s portrayal is consistent and skillful, even down to his odd posture, and my reaction to the character, that he seems incredibly creepy and repellent, subjective, as was my feeling that Phoenix seemed too old to portray the character. (A subplot is Quell continuing longing for a girl he knew when she was 16; it’s unclear how old Quell is supposed to have been when he knew her, but the flashback scenes make no attempt to make Phoenix look younger. Also, the plot fits better if we assume Quell was about 20, not 30 or so, when he courted the girl and went off to join the Navy. But Quell/Phoenix looks too old to have been 20 around 1941.)
In a way, figures like Dodd (or Hubbard) represent the seemingly very American ability to turn imagination, even an amalgamation of psychobabble and pseudoscience, into reality. No doubt it’s unfair of me to want the movie to be Elmer Gantry, i.e. more about the spiritual leader as huckster. No doubt Anderson is a very skillful filmmaker. His camerawork, especially in shooting wide vistas, is memorable, and there is an intensity he brings to his storytelling. But, no doubt, I found The Master only intermittently spellbinding.
IMDb link
viewed 11/14/12 5:15 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 11/15–11/17/12
Friday, January 6, 2012
A Dangerous Method (***
It’s probably a cliché to point out that being a good therapist doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to resolving your own conflicts. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly)
Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.
IMDb link
Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.
IMDb link
Friday, November 11, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
The Skin I Live In (***1/4)
This film’s plot should seem as ridiculous as bad plastic surgery; perhaps only Pedro Almodóvar could make it so compulsively watchable. Almodóvar never truly repeats himself yet makes movies that are somehow of a piece. Adapting a novel by Thierry Jonquet, he edges into science fiction territory—his main character (Antonio Banderas) is a surgeon specializing in face transplants and, yes, lab-grown skin—but inside of ten minutes the plot veers into more familiar themes. For Almodóvar, those include obsessive characters who follow their emotions to questionable ends. The surgeon’s own backstory unspools in a one-minute discourse by his housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) that replaces what might have been a 20-minute flashback in some other director’s hands.
The housekeeper is not just the housekeeper, having a history with her employer, and the young woman to whom she’s unspooling (Elena Anaya), the surgeon’s experimental subject, is not just an experimental subject, but we have to wait until well into the movie to learn who she is, how the doctor came to be keeping her locked away in his house, and how she got the burn scars that the doctor is erasing with his artificial skin. The movie’s title emphasizes identity, a theme of many an Almodóvar melodrama, though not in the same way as here. It’s full of the arresting visuals—the girl’s body suit, especially—for which Almodóvar is known. And it’s full of actors familiar from the director’s other work. Banderas had played other obsessive characters in films such as Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Paredes had starred or costarred in four Almodóvar films, including All About my Mother; and Anaya had appeared in Talk to Her. What it’s not is moving; the fast-paced melodrama will suck you in, and your allegiance will shift among the characters, but for all it’s plotting, there’s not enough history to these characters to make us care about them, or perhaps the story is just too creepy for it to be that kind of movie.
Definitely worth watching for Almodóvar fans, but maybe not the place to start, unless you have a taste for something a little twisted. And a pretty good twist it is.
IMDB link
viewed 11/23/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/23/11
The housekeeper is not just the housekeeper, having a history with her employer, and the young woman to whom she’s unspooling (Elena Anaya), the surgeon’s experimental subject, is not just an experimental subject, but we have to wait until well into the movie to learn who she is, how the doctor came to be keeping her locked away in his house, and how she got the burn scars that the doctor is erasing with his artificial skin. The movie’s title emphasizes identity, a theme of many an Almodóvar melodrama, though not in the same way as here. It’s full of the arresting visuals—the girl’s body suit, especially—for which Almodóvar is known. And it’s full of actors familiar from the director’s other work. Banderas had played other obsessive characters in films such as Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Paredes had starred or costarred in four Almodóvar films, including All About my Mother; and Anaya had appeared in Talk to Her. What it’s not is moving; the fast-paced melodrama will suck you in, and your allegiance will shift among the characters, but for all it’s plotting, there’s not enough history to these characters to make us care about them, or perhaps the story is just too creepy for it to be that kind of movie.
Definitely worth watching for Almodóvar fans, but maybe not the place to start, unless you have a taste for something a little twisted. And a pretty good twist it is.
IMDB link
viewed 11/23/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/23/11
Friday, October 8, 2010
It’s Kind of a Funny Story (***)
For a comedy that starts with the lead character (Keir Gilchrist) contemplating suicide and set in a mental hospital, this isn’t as black as you’d think. Young Craig is a prep-school kid struggling with his desire to please his workaholic dad, his attraction to his best friend’s girl, and the pressures of school. He doesn’t really want to kill himself, but a short voluntary commitment seems like a good opportunity to sort things out.
Notwithstanding the setting, he manages to meet a girl (Emma Roberts). And a new friend, played by Zach Galifianakis. Galifianakis threatens to become the most unlikely household name since “Schwarzeneggar.” The burly actor isn’t much like the Governator, but his full beard and daft persona are nearly as distinct as Schwarzeneggar’s Austrian monotone. He played the oddest characters in both The Hangover and Dinner for Schmucks—which is saying something—but here for the first time is an actual mental patient. And yet here he’s relatively normal. A few of the other patients, like Craig’s catatonic roommate, border on “zany,” but the principal characters are fairly realistic. Gilchrist (of The United States of Tara) does a nice job and looks the age he’s playing. (He kind of also looks like Justin Long’s younger brother, but without projecting smarminess.)
The writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck previously made Half Nelson and Sugar, which had the odd laugh but were practically docudramas in terms of style. Those had original screenplays, but in this case, they are adapting a Ned Vizzini novel. Possibly for that reason, there is a lighter feel. Boden and Fleck incorporate fantasy sequences and even a bit of animation. The movie may annoy some with its glib attitude toward overcoming mental illness, a point actually addressed in the voiceover. Only in Roberts’s character (and occasionally with Galifianakis’s) do we get the sense of someone who is truly, and non-comically, wounded psychologically. But this is best viewed as a coming-of-age story with a novel setting and a few laughs. Not a bad thing, that.
IMDB link
viewed 9/16/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17 and 10/8/10
Notwithstanding the setting, he manages to meet a girl (Emma Roberts). And a new friend, played by Zach Galifianakis. Galifianakis threatens to become the most unlikely household name since “Schwarzeneggar.” The burly actor isn’t much like the Governator, but his full beard and daft persona are nearly as distinct as Schwarzeneggar’s Austrian monotone. He played the oddest characters in both The Hangover and Dinner for Schmucks—which is saying something—but here for the first time is an actual mental patient. And yet here he’s relatively normal. A few of the other patients, like Craig’s catatonic roommate, border on “zany,” but the principal characters are fairly realistic. Gilchrist (of The United States of Tara) does a nice job and looks the age he’s playing. (He kind of also looks like Justin Long’s younger brother, but without projecting smarminess.)
The writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck previously made Half Nelson and Sugar, which had the odd laugh but were practically docudramas in terms of style. Those had original screenplays, but in this case, they are adapting a Ned Vizzini novel. Possibly for that reason, there is a lighter feel. Boden and Fleck incorporate fantasy sequences and even a bit of animation. The movie may annoy some with its glib attitude toward overcoming mental illness, a point actually addressed in the voiceover. Only in Roberts’s character (and occasionally with Galifianakis’s) do we get the sense of someone who is truly, and non-comically, wounded psychologically. But this is best viewed as a coming-of-age story with a novel setting and a few laughs. Not a bad thing, that.
IMDB link
viewed 9/16/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17 and 10/8/10
Friday, January 2, 2009
Revolutionary Road (***1/4)
Ah, the suburbs, the fertile playgrounds of wholesome family life. Or, maybe, a stifling social desert of conformity where dreams go to die. That’s one difference between mainstream and indie sensibility. Revolutionary Road, not to be confused with Reservation Road, obviously leans to the latter. Titanic lovers Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite, mostly unhappily, as the strivers of Richard Yates’s novel, published in 1961, when the critique of the suburbs as sterile had only begun to gel. (Surely, if Sinclair Lewis had written 1920’s Main Street a few decades later, he’d have set it in a bedroom community, not a small town.)
Yates means the suburbs as a stand-in for the worst aspects of postwar America as a whole, and Winslet’s character, April Wheeler, as a tragic heroine. Screenwriter Justin Haythe and director Sam Mendes hew close to Yates’s plot, though it’s less clear that they share April’s anti-conformist sensibility. She can instead be seen as an unhappy woman who pushes her office-worker husband, Frank, to be someone he’s not as a substitute for her own failed ambitions. (In the opening, she’s an actress in a bad local theater production.) Her desire—which she persuades Frank to share—to escape her Connecticut suburb can seem desperate, the location only symbolic.
And yet Winslet synthesizes this volatile woman so that she seems comprehensible, though not necessarily to her husband. Director Mendes is on familiar ground, having directed American Beauty, to which Yate’s novel has been compared. There, it was the husband who rebels against conformity, and his wife who has the affair. (Frank, disregarding cliché, seduces his new secretary.) Revolutionary Road is similar to American Beauty, but not as distinctive. It is equally well shot. A hall-of-mirrors-style shot of hats and suits lined up waiting for the train, and another scene where Frank and April run into the forest remaining in their development, stand out.
But there is not the arch humor, nor the quirkiness, though they may not have been to some tastes anyway. Similar, perhaps, are the not-altogether-agreeable characters, who include a mental patient whom the Wheelers reluctantly befriend. The many scenes of confrontation that form a lot of the movie have the effect of keeping them at an emotional remove. Perhaps this is intentional.
Frank is a talky character, and, indie film or not, Revolutionary Road is not quiet or effete, or especially subtle. Whether seen as a story of a mismatched couple or an existential dilemma about selling out one’s one dreams, it consistently held my interest.
IMDB link
viewed 1/5(?)/09 at Ritz East; reviewed 1/14/09
Yates means the suburbs as a stand-in for the worst aspects of postwar America as a whole, and Winslet’s character, April Wheeler, as a tragic heroine. Screenwriter Justin Haythe and director Sam Mendes hew close to Yates’s plot, though it’s less clear that they share April’s anti-conformist sensibility. She can instead be seen as an unhappy woman who pushes her office-worker husband, Frank, to be someone he’s not as a substitute for her own failed ambitions. (In the opening, she’s an actress in a bad local theater production.) Her desire—which she persuades Frank to share—to escape her Connecticut suburb can seem desperate, the location only symbolic.
And yet Winslet synthesizes this volatile woman so that she seems comprehensible, though not necessarily to her husband. Director Mendes is on familiar ground, having directed American Beauty, to which Yate’s novel has been compared. There, it was the husband who rebels against conformity, and his wife who has the affair. (Frank, disregarding cliché, seduces his new secretary.) Revolutionary Road is similar to American Beauty, but not as distinctive. It is equally well shot. A hall-of-mirrors-style shot of hats and suits lined up waiting for the train, and another scene where Frank and April run into the forest remaining in their development, stand out.
But there is not the arch humor, nor the quirkiness, though they may not have been to some tastes anyway. Similar, perhaps, are the not-altogether-agreeable characters, who include a mental patient whom the Wheelers reluctantly befriend. The many scenes of confrontation that form a lot of the movie have the effect of keeping them at an emotional remove. Perhaps this is intentional.
Frank is a talky character, and, indie film or not, Revolutionary Road is not quiet or effete, or especially subtle. Whether seen as a story of a mismatched couple or an existential dilemma about selling out one’s one dreams, it consistently held my interest.
IMDB link
viewed 1/5(?)/09 at Ritz East; reviewed 1/14/09
Friday, May 4, 2007
The Flying Scotsman (***)
? The true story of bicyclist Graeme Obree (Jonny Lee Miller), who not only set a couple of world records in the 1990s but did so using a bike he built himself using spare parts and developed innovative riding techniques.
+ I like my heroes modest, and Miller’s version of Obree fits the part. The slightly "off" nature of the sometimes-melancholic Obree is what most distinguishes this from other sports-underdog movies, although Obree’s confidence in his cycling abilities never flags. The unusual parts of the plot, including the bizarre attempts by the International Cycling Union to disqualify him, are true. The movie most reminded me of The World’s Fastest Indian, another true story about a home tinkerer who hits the big time. The difference is, motorcyclist Burt Munro only had to build and ride his vehicle; Obree had to obsessively condition himself as well.
- There’s not much of an ending. Obree is a less colorful figure than Anthony Hopkins’s Burt Munro, and the non-cycling-related scenes aren’t compelling.
= *** Not a must-see, but anyone who likes these types of stories won’t be disappointed.
IMDB link
reviewed 5/11/07
+ I like my heroes modest, and Miller’s version of Obree fits the part. The slightly "off" nature of the sometimes-melancholic Obree is what most distinguishes this from other sports-underdog movies, although Obree’s confidence in his cycling abilities never flags. The unusual parts of the plot, including the bizarre attempts by the International Cycling Union to disqualify him, are true. The movie most reminded me of The World’s Fastest Indian, another true story about a home tinkerer who hits the big time. The difference is, motorcyclist Burt Munro only had to build and ride his vehicle; Obree had to obsessively condition himself as well.
- There’s not much of an ending. Obree is a less colorful figure than Anthony Hopkins’s Burt Munro, and the non-cycling-related scenes aren’t compelling.
= *** Not a must-see, but anyone who likes these types of stories won’t be disappointed.
IMDB link
reviewed 5/11/07
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