thecineman

Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is a tormented schizophrenic man who is let out of a hospital despite suffering from extreme symptoms of nearly continuous auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and a highly fragmented, discontinuous sense of reality. His one steady goal is to find his young daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who has begun a new life as an adoptee, following the murder of her mother. Peter first visits his own mother, a taciturn, emotionally withholding woman who is not at all pleased to see him. Later he discovers his daughter's whereabouts, when her adoptive mother brings Nicole to visit her grandmother (who is as chilly toward Nicole as she is toward Peter). Meanwhile, a police detective (Robert Albert), searching for a serial child killer, has concluded that Peter is his man. A fateful ending is set up when the detective encounters Peter with Nicole at an isolated beach.

There are serious flaws in this film: the screenplay is not well wrought and is too full of ambiguities, especially the entire serial child killing subplot. This is highly distracting. The acting is second rate, except for Greene's and MacDonald's performances. The film's strength lies in Kerrigan's insightful deployment of sound, setting and other effects to create the clinical realism of Peter's schizophrenic experience. Peter's intense, perpetual fear is palpable. Much of the film is shot in his car, where he has placed masking tape over the mirror, and newspaper over several windows, to fortify his privacy. The effect is an impacted atmosphere of paranoid insulation. Peter's hallucinated auditory experience – garbled voices, static and other noise, unaccompanied by any visual representations – is clinically valid. The voices and noise haunt him steadily. He tells Nicole he has had a radio device implanted in his head, with a transmitter in a fingernail. Earlier we had been exposed to his violent efforts to rid himself of these devices using scissors or a knife to gouge them out – forms of delusion-driven self-mutilation that are uncommon but not rare in persons suffering the throes of severe acute psychotic episodes. The use of tight close up camera angles - viewing Peter from just behind his back or in profile in his car - heighten the sense of claustrophobia, the extreme narrowing of Peter's psychotic world. The setting - Miscou Island, in New Brunswick – adds further accents of wildness and isolation to the overall tone of the film.

It can be argued that the detective's pursuit of Peter adds yet another source of paranoid fever to the film, though for me this conceit does not ring true. The fact that someone really is after Peter detracts from the power of his delusions. Other than this, Kerrigan can be congratulated for steering clear of the false visuals (realistically visualized imaginary friends and enemies) and other clinically implausible effects that Ron Howard used more recently in A Beautiful Mind. Anyone – professional or lay viewer – might rightly wonder how Peter could be discharged from the hospital in such poor psychiatric condition. Of course that happens every day in most contemporary short stay hospital settings, because involuntary treatment laws in most states prohibit keeping patients against their will except in the most extreme circumstances of immediate potential for violence. But we are given the impression at the start of this film that Peter had been incarcerated in a more traditional mental hospital, the sort in which people stay for long periods before discharge, until they appear relatively free of symptoms, sometimes longer. Of course these large old facilities are typically short staffed, keen clinical observation of patients may be scarce, and patients not uncommonly can muster a façade of normality to win their freedom.

The depiction of Peter's mother is also troublesome. Her grim withholding of affection for Peter and Nicole resurrects the spectra of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a psycho dynamic fiction popular the 1950s and 60s that accused parents, especially mothers, of causing schizophrenia through self serving, unaffectionate regard for their children. This myth was laid to rest long ago, and it is a black mark against this film to see such a notion resurrected. It does not dispel the power of this negative maternal portrayal when, from a distance, we see the mother crying as she hangs one of her son's shirts on a clothesline near the end.

Clean, Shaven shares with David Cronenberg's film, Spider, the distinction of offering the most believable portraits of highly symptomatic schizophrenic experience that have been brought to the big screen. I prefer Spider because the acting is uniformly first rate and the screenplay is superior. Both films pull the viewer into an exquisitely painful, odd, lonely, and ultimately unrewarding world, into experiences that many moviegoers would, no doubt, prefer to avoid. Dramatically, this is a "C" movie, but the portrayal of schizophrenia rates an "A."

Here's a very busy inspirational film for personal growth seekers. It's based on the premise that everything in the universe is mutable and uncertain, and, this being the case, there is always hope that change is possible. People around the northwest are piling in to see this film; it's a huge word-of-mouth success in these parts. And why not. We all need to have hope, a vision of positive possibilities, especially in troubled times. The film is an example of an increasingly popular film genre that has been called `narrative documentary' or `essay documentary.' It's a filmmaking strategy in which a particular theme is approached from different angles, using different methods - here mixing an array of talking heads, animation sequences, and segments of a dramatized story.

Nearly a score of physicists, molecular biologists, health professionals, and spiritual commentators press in upon us, earnestly explaining the connections between deep science and everyday human experience. These talking heads chatter at breakneck newsbite speed to tell us how quantum physics proves that the world we call real is in fact just a series of possibilities of what's real. This being the case, our convictions about our psychological reality, our presumed limitations, and our assumptions about other people and relationships are also just a few among many possibilities. Acceptance of a helpless victim role and addictive devotion to our pet beliefs thus make no sense. In fact our repetitive negative thoughts and feelings actually affect the microanatomy of our brains, creating a self-perpetuated, ever more ingrained set of expectations and behaviors. But we can choose and pursue other possibilities.

The drama concerns a woman (played by Marlee Matlin) who in the years since a failed marriage has been burdened by persistent negative habits of thought, resulting in poor self regard and caustic appraisals of men, resulting in unhappiness and isolation. But through acts of magical realism, she begins to behave in uncharacteristic ways, and gradually her most cherished if cynical assumptions are challenged. The animated parts are the best thing in the film. There are wonderful views of the labyrinthine jungle of neurons making up the brain, increasing and altering the connections among themselves in ever changing dynamisms as a result of experience. And there are lovable Disneyesque portrayals of chemical neurotransmitters, little anthropomorphic globules of red dopamine hotheads and other blue cool types prancing from site to site inside our heads. These parts are a lot of fun.

Physicist Fritjof Capra wrote of the connections between quantum physics and consciousness 30 years ago in his book, "The Tao of Physics." There's nothing in this film that he didn't cover as well or better way back then. In fact, there has been little progress on this theme in the intervening decades, and for good reason. The comparison of issues of matter and energy in quantum physics with human experience is an example of the all-too-common falsity of reasoning based on analogy. Furthermore, there is no need to complicate matters of human behavior by conflating them with the `noise' of abstract thinking from the physical sciences. Experience does alter both brain chemistry and anatomy. No doubt of that. This is the biological basis of the widely acknowledged fact that ingrained patterns of behavior, thought, emotional response, and addiction are so hard to alter. It is also true that when we do risk new behaviors, when we combat the helpless tendency to repeat response patterns that are familiar, even if destructive, this can lead to positive change and personal growth. It may even, as the film suggests, change our brain anatomy.

But quantum physics need not be invoked to explain or fortify these notions, whether it is related or not. To do so may bring the respectability of `hard science' to psychological processes, but the price may be simply to confuse many people, especially in the dizzying sort of presentation given in this film. (My partner, who is neither a scientist nor a psychologist, found the film edifying but tuned out all the talk by the physicists.) I especially enjoyed the comments of Candace Pert, a molecular biologist who discovered the opioid brain receptor for endorphins, and several of the health professionals. On the other hand, I was repelled by J. Z. Knight, who `channels' the spiritual entity `Ramtha.' Knight is a woman who endlessly blathers stagy banalities but can probably sell oil to a Saudi. One reason for the film's popularity here in Portland is that the location shots in the dramatic sequence were all filmed locally.

If you're like Errol Morris, and you want to make documentaries about unusual personalities, it's one thing to choose obscure subjects, people like Fred Leuchter (aka "Mr. Death") or men that excel in topiary hedge sculpture or the study of the African mole rat (two of the people interviewed in "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control"). Not many critics out there will be waiting to pounce if you don't get things just right about the likes of people like these. But it's quite another matter if you choose Robert S. McNamara, one of the last century's most towering, controversial, and - some would say - evil characters. "Fog of War" distills more than 20 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with McNamara over a span of two years, when McNamara was in his mid-80s, and the subjects - all various McNamara ventures - range from "his" World War II, through his days at Ford Motor Company, the Cuban missile crisis, and - finally and mainly - his views of the Vietnam War.

As a result, Morris now finds himself in a no man's land of critical crossfire. On the one hand, film critics - people like Steven Holden, Roger Ebert and J. Hoberman - uniformly praise this work. While political pundits of the left - people like Eric Alterman and Alexander Cockburn of "The Nation" - lacerate Morris, accusing him of being overmatched, manipulated, not doing his homework (i.e., being naïve and unprepared), and thus allowing his film to be nothing but a conduit for the formidably crafty McNamara's continuing campaign of self aggrandizement and distortions of history. Whew. I think the controversy here is based on a misconstruction of the film's purposes by the pundits. First, it is quite clear that McNamara, in full command of his fierce intellectual and interpersonal powers, is not about to be pushed around by an assertive interviewer. McNamara is gonna say what McNamara wants to say, period. To drive home this point, Morris gives us a brief epilogue in which he asks McNamara a few trenchant questions about his sense of responsibility for the Vietnam War, why he didn't speak out against the war, and so on. And McNamara won't bite. He stonewalls Morris absolutely, with comments like, "I am not going to say any more than I have." Or, "I always get into trouble when I try to answer a question like that."

More importantly, it doesn't matter very much if Morris or McNamara does not get all the facts straight. If the political pundits went to the movies more often, at least to Morris's films, they would know that his primary interest is in the character of his subjects - their integrity and beliefs and ways of explaining or rationalizing themselves and their lives: he's into people way more than into facts. "Fog of War" is not an oral history, it is the study of a person. For all that, in my estimation, Morris does get on film as close to an acceptance of responsibility for his actions in two wars as McNamara is likely ever to make, short of some dramatic, delirium-driven deathbed confession. He speaks of the likelihood that he and Curtis LeMay would have been deemed war criminals for the fire bombing of Japanese cities, had our side lost. And he speaks clearly when he says "we were wrong" in not seeing that the Vietnam War was a civil war, not a phase of some larger Cold War strategy by the USSR or China. What do the pundits want?

Nor was it Morris's purpose to use Santayana's lesson about repeating history to rail at Bush's preemptive war in Iraq. In fact Morris decided to make this film way back in 1995, after reading several books by McNamara and concluding that he was a quintessential man of the 20th Century, embodying all that was so outstandingly smart and sophisticated and ultimately destructive. The interviews wrapped sometime in 2001, the year before Iraq. As usual in Morris's films, the editing is superb, with seamless use of archival footage and special visuals created for this film. I do think Morris gratuitously flattered McNamara by organizing the film around 11 platitudes of his - many of them banal aphorisms known to most high school graduates, students of martial arts, or your grandmother (e.g., "get the data," "empathize with your enemy," "rationality will not save us," "belief and seeing are both often wrong").

Political pundits, mired in interpreting concretisms from the historical record, not only see too few films but also don't take seriously the symbolic visuals and sounds offered here. Philip Glass has created an edgy, anxious score that feels just right, just creepy enough for the macabre subjects at hand. I'm also thinking of the scenes when McNamara is recounting his pioneering (he claims) studies of auto safety. As we listen to him, Morris shows us human skulls wrapped in white linen being dropped several floors through a stairwell to smash upon the floor below, all in slow motion. The effect is chilling and speaks volumes about McNamara's famed passionless capacity to treat human carnage as a matter of statistical calculation. It is through such poetic characterization that Morris keeps the game with McNamara in balance.