Mad to Be Normal

Mad, liberating 60's. Peace, love, sex, grass, time of hope for a different world, the hope long extinguished and barely remembered. Here comes Dr. Laing, the reformer, trying to change the cruelty of mental health treatment. Or to be precise the maltreatment. Treatment would presume decisions that benefit the patient, the maltreatment was perpetuated to make it easier on society to remove the suffering mental patients from public eye and concern. In this jerky, meandering flick Dr. Laing comes off as a troubled man who could have used some TLC himself. Sadly, we still don't know what to do with mental illness, apart from medicating. Fifty plus years later we are overdue for a new Dr. Laing, perhaps one with less personal baggage, thus harder to dismiss and remove.

As one with direct experience with the psychiatric hospitalization system, I would highly recommend this movie to any mental health professional. It presents a revolutionary, yet obvious take on how to treat mental illness and how to improve the quality of life for a patient who is suffering, by simply treating them like a human being in need of love and attention. David Tennant and Elisabeth Moss both presented the philosophy of such an endeavor well through their performances. This is a truly human story and a wonderful sneak peek into what can happen if we use our common sense and do what we feel is right. Unfortunately even today, many years after the events of this story, there are still challenges to overcome to give mentally ill patients the best care they deserve and focus on their needs above all. Are we protecting them or protecting ourselves from them? Speaking from the inside, I would say I'm not so sure.

When an excellent cast turn in strong performances - David Tennant, Elizabeth Moss and Gabriel Byrne are all outstanding in the lead roles - how can you end up with an unimpressive, unaffecting film? Can't be the subject matter - RD Laing was a fascinating, divisive, bold, brilliant, reckless public intellectual whose opinions and ideas about psychiatry and society challenged the established order of, well... everything.

I'm sorry to say responsibility for this mediocre, somewhat messy film lies with writer/director Robert Mullan. The dialogue is often cliched, the scenes poorly constructed and the direction oddly distant and static. All of which makes for a rather uninvolving experience, which is a great pity given the talent at his disposal not to mention the compelling story there to be told. There's simply no real point of view to get hold of.

Laing's work remains acutely controversial, genuinely reaching for something even he as a highly qualified practitioner with a highly original brain and skilled writer could not quite realise. There's an argument his deep insights were too far ahead of his time, but equally he might just have been so damaged, deluded and egocentric that he didn't care who or what got broken. Some of that is there in the film but despite the warm colour palette this exploration of a more interesting British counterpart to the likes of Timothy Leary and Arthur Janov fails to engage, and leaves you cold.

Set in the 1960's, the film centers on the rather revolutionary psychiatric treatments of the time conducted by Dr. R. D. Laing. David Tennant stars as Laing, who was strongly opposed to accepted treatments such as electroshock therapy and tranquilizers for mental illness ,believing more in non-drug (except for LSD) and more natural therapies. Most of Laing's work took place at Kingsley Hall, between 1965 to 1970 in East London.

Elisabeth Moss co-stars here as Angie Wood, a graduate student at Columbia, who while attending one of Laing's lectures is completely taken in by his charismatic persona and they will soon begin a relationship. There's a most solid cast in the movie, including Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon.

Unfortunately, the film itself despite its fine cast, became a real slog for me to stay with, with its very deliberate pacing and quite depressive tone. Also, for whatever reason I wasn't able to really connect with the characters as presented.

Overall, I thought this drama had some quite interesting aspects to it, but I was not able to emotionally connect with the characters here , and combined with the other factors as mentioned, I can't say it was entertaining.

The film is about the period in time when psychiatrist Ronald David Laing managed his home as a refuge for mentally ill patients. A firm believer against coercion, he allowed the people living there to express themselves naturally in a safe environment, while he and an assistant would listen and try to help, in the hope that their minds would heal themselves. His theories were very much against the general medical opinion so he has come to blows not only with the medical community, but with his bigoted neighbors who didn't approve of not normal people living around them.

In a way, that state of more or less open conflict with the world is what defines the title of the movie. If normal people behave like that, then you must be mad to want to belong with them. Every actor in this film (and check out the great cast) is acting really well and the mood of the movie, depressing as you might expect, is very well framed. Some people accused it of slow pacing, but if you think about it, you can't do a fast paced movie about mental illness. It is a slow and pain causing condition and the only way to understand it is to go slow.

I personally like David Tennant a lot, but I think he was even better cast. He is perfect as the foul mouthed Scottish hipster doctor battling the world for the sake of the patients in his very care. I liked that the movie didn't try to take a side. It very lightly presented Laing's theories then proceeded to show what they meant in practice: with some the results were great, although they didn't lead to healing so much as to less pain, with others the approach was insufficient, while the level of care he afforded his patients made a catastrophic mess of his personal life. The key to the argument is how can a mentally deficient patient decide what's the best course of action for him and how can anyone else prove their treatment is what the patient needed when it alters the very essence of a person's mind? Who would be the more entitled to make a decision? The patient before a treatment or the patient after it? Not to mention society at large, family and doctors, who also feel entitled to pieces of people's lives.

Bottom line: not a beautiful film, but one that makes you ask questions. It provides no answers of its own, though.