BEFORE: This is going to count as my Easter film - I tried to link to "Paul, Apostle of Christ" this year, since last year's Easter film was "Mary Magdalene", but it wasn't possible. The linking just wasn't there - maybe next year.
Bradley Whitford carries over from "Tick, Tick...Boom!", where he played Stephen Sondheim. I'm sorry if you thought I was going to follow the Andrew Garfield link to "The Eyes of Tammy Faye", since that film is about preachers, but I realized too late that would also have been a cool idea that would have fit in with a church theme. I will get to that film, it's high on the priority list and currently scheduled for late May or early June. So there will be at least three or four films this year with Andrew Garfield, but they just won't be all together. Peter Dinklage had a BIG Movie Year in 2021, no pun intended, with five appearances, but so far in 2022, just two.
I'm posting late on Monday, but this still counts as my Easter Sunday film - I hope to catch up some later this week when I get back on animated films, which tend to be shorter.
THE PLOT: Dr. Alan Stone is treating three paranoid schizophrenic patients at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, each of whom believes they are Jesus Christ.
AFTER: So by now, as I write this, it's the day AFTER Easter - mea culpa, I'm trying to catch up. But we had a pretty low-key Easter, we didn't really leave the house all weekend, except I went out once to get bagels. I'd worked late on Good Friday, which is USUALLY the day we go out to eat at a Brazilian churrascaria in Queens, because there's less competition for meat, it being a fasting day for the religious folks. (I thought of this a few years back, it's kind of genius.) And I'm no longer a practicing Catholic, so I didn't go to church, just stayed in and caught up on my sleep.
I had a little bit of Easter candy last night, mostly Russel Stover egg-shaped chocolates with different fillings, and I figured I'd load up on them at a drugstore on Monday, when they're usually 50% off - BUT I tried five different drug-stores in Manhattan and couldn't find any, the shelves were all cleared! And I know they didn't pack them up to make room for Memorial Day candy, because that's not a thing! Where did all the candy go? Well, I've got a couple of guesses - first off, this is the first real Easter in three years where people can full-on interact with each other, so my guess is that it all got sold, people having parties and get-togethers, post-Covid (so it's going to be a CRAZY summer, I think...). The other possibility is that there were supply chain issues, maybe the stores didn't get all the candy they wanted - mostly Peeps were left today, and I hate Peeps. It's also possible that since the pandemic hit in March 2020, nobody left the house to buy Easter candy in April (I still saw some on the shelves in late May) so some stores packed up what didn't sell and tried to sell it again in 2021, which meant they had to order less new candy to fill the shelves, and then in 2022, the store managers didn't want to go too crazy, or were lazy and just repeated the order from the previous year, which means they didn't order enough. All I know is, I was only able to get a few creme-filled or marshmallow chocolate eggs, plus one Reese-ster Bunny (yeah, it's a thing, peanut butter filling a chocolate bunny) so I've got to check online tonight to see if I can still get some more candy somewhere, somehow.
But let's get to the movie, allegedly based on a true story, about three men in a mental hospital who all believe that they're Jesus - and the doctor who, for some reason, thought it would be a swell idea to put all three men in the same room, to see if they'd be cured of their delusions, or maybe he wanted to see them fight each other - like Jesus Highlander, maybe there can be only one. Jesus may have been a man of peace, so if they fight, well, that would also prove that they're just not him.
Look, I'm no psychiatric expert, so I have to rely on the film to clue me in here - what this doctor did in putting these three patients together was not recommended, the treatment of forcing mentally ill people to confront their delusions was radical back in the late 1950's. But this doctor saw it as less dangerous than shock therapy (now called ECT) - but he'd heard of a case where two different women believed they were the Virgin Mary, and after they were roommates in a psychiatric hospital, one recovered from her delusion. OK, but that was women, if you put three guys together who all believe they're Jesus, there's probably going to be a fight, because each one would declare the other two to be blasphemers and impostors, while of course, claiming to be the genuine article himself.
Unfortunately, the doctor's methods didn't really work here - he noticed that the three men were writing letters to various people that were never answered, so he wrote fake letters back to the men, in one case pretending to be the psych hospital administrator. Umm, don't lie to Jesus, dude, I think that's breaking one of the commandments, and Jesus won't be happy when he finds out. MIlton Rokeach (the real doctor, not the one in the film) wrote a book about the unique therapy, and in the book, while he claimed that while he didn't cure the three Christs of their delusions, he was cured of his own godlike delusion that he could manipulate them out of their beliefs. Yep, the doctor was the only one who became more aware, but also lost his own faith in the psychiatric process, isn't that an ironic twist?
It just feels like there's something MISSING here, because the film never really even tries to get into WHY these men think they're Jesus, or WHAT the implications are of all that. Do they even have the same reason for their delusions, or do they maybe have three different reasons? I can't even tell, because the film never even goes there. So, then, umm, what's the point of even telling this story, if we can't even get a grasp on what it all means?
There's a bit of a throwaway scene where Dr. Stone, played by Richard Gere, is interacting with his daughters, one of whom is being called names at school. He deliberately mixes up the names of his two daughters, Shirley and Molly, to make a point - no matter what he calls them, it doesn't change who they ARE. Therefore, it doesn't matter what any kids at school call them, for the same reason. That's brilliant, and good parenting to boot. So, umm, why can't we see this same guy applying similar logic and reasoning to help cure his patients?
There's plenty of stuff to work with - one of the Jesuses is a Little Person, so there's the possibility of him overcompensating with a God complex. This one also listens to opera and asks to be returned to England, a place he's never been. Another Jesus keeps taking showers because he's trying to get rid of a constant stench, but one that only he can smell. His wife died after a botched abortion, so there's probably a lot of guilt driving his actions. The third Jesus is the quiet one, but it's always the quiet ones you have to look out for, right? He's the son of an abusive religious fanatic, so I don't know, maybe start looking into THAT?
But then the film gets distracted by SO many other things - the battles with the hospital administrators, the back-story of the attractive young research assistant that all the Jesuses have the hots for, and the social drinking of the doctor's wife, which probably increased when she saw the attractive young research assistant that her husband was hanging out with, because she remembers when SHE was the attractive young research assistant.
The movie gets so bogged down in all of THAT that it never really gets around to any of the WHY of the God complex, and then, before you know it, the movie's over and overall, we haven't really learned anything. What a shame, there's just no Third Act here and it just stops, with the doctor getting fired, therefore his therapies are discontinued. But if you weren't going to finish the story, maybe it would have been better to never start it in the first place.
Also starring Richard Gere (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Julianna Margulies (last seen in "The Upside"), Peter Dinklage (last heard in "The Croods: A New Age"), Walton Goggins (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "She's All That"), Charlotte Hope (last seen in "Allied"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Jane Alexander (last seen in "Feast of Love"), James Monroe Iglehart, Julian Acosta, Danny Deferrari (last seen in "Private Life"), Chris Bannow (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Kathryn Leigh Scott, Christina Scherer (last seen in "The Intern"), Nancy Robinette (last seen in "Serial Mom"), Ripley Sobo (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Ava Gallucci,
RATING: 4 out of 10 verses of the "Chock Full O'Nuts" jingle
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