Mad To Be Normal (15.)
Directed by Robert Mullan.
Starring David Tennant, Elisabeth Moss, Gabriel Byrne, David Bamber and Michael Gambon. 105 mins.
In a modern day film about the sixties, the sixties period detail is often a potent signifier. In say, X-Men: First Class it communicates a sense of lost glamour; while in the Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side it suggests the sense of a scuzzy demi-world where the glamour of the swinging social revolution clashed with the drab reality of England outside swinging Chelsea and the West End. The sixties period detail in this film about R.D. Laing is positively Withnailian, and it seems to signify a period of flux, a window of opportunity where any charismatic chancer could create a swirl around themselves that could pass for revolutionary in the absence of any perspective.
Laing was a psychiatrist who became a real counter culture figure; partly through his refusal to use drugs to treat mental illness. When I was school he was still a big deal (I remember being sat down to watch Ken Loach's Family Life, which was based on his ideas) With his paisley shirts, unconventional approach, free thinking attitudes, cool sounding initials (oh to be a JK, a JRR or an RD) and string of “And then Timothy Leary said to me” anecdotes, Laing could well qualify as one of those sixties figures who seemed like a visionary during chat show appearances but most of whose reputation has failed to make it through the journey down the last half century.
Mullan's film concentrates on the last half of the sixties where Laing ran an institution at Kingsley House in the East End where patients and doctors lived together communally and there was no treatment other than talking to patients and trying to understand them. The film's approach to narrative would surely meet with the institutions approval: nothing is too structured, nothing is forced and the characters are allowed to express themselves largely free of the imposition of pushing forward a story. The results are mixed: it is maddeningly lax, rambling and even a touch self indulgent but the participants really pull something out of themselves: Tenant immediately establishes the charisma that got Laing attention; Byrne and Gambon are compelling as two of his patients. Like Laing's therapy not much is resolved or advanced, but the sense of having gone through an intense experience is strong.
Directed by Robert Mullan.
Starring David Tennant, Elisabeth Moss, Gabriel Byrne, David Bamber and Michael Gambon. 105 mins.
In a modern day film about the sixties, the sixties period detail is often a potent signifier. In say, X-Men: First Class it communicates a sense of lost glamour; while in the Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side it suggests the sense of a scuzzy demi-world where the glamour of the swinging social revolution clashed with the drab reality of England outside swinging Chelsea and the West End. The sixties period detail in this film about R.D. Laing is positively Withnailian, and it seems to signify a period of flux, a window of opportunity where any charismatic chancer could create a swirl around themselves that could pass for revolutionary in the absence of any perspective.
Laing was a psychiatrist who became a real counter culture figure; partly through his refusal to use drugs to treat mental illness. When I was school he was still a big deal (I remember being sat down to watch Ken Loach's Family Life, which was based on his ideas) With his paisley shirts, unconventional approach, free thinking attitudes, cool sounding initials (oh to be a JK, a JRR or an RD) and string of “And then Timothy Leary said to me” anecdotes, Laing could well qualify as one of those sixties figures who seemed like a visionary during chat show appearances but most of whose reputation has failed to make it through the journey down the last half century.
Mullan's film concentrates on the last half of the sixties where Laing ran an institution at Kingsley House in the East End where patients and doctors lived together communally and there was no treatment other than talking to patients and trying to understand them. The film's approach to narrative would surely meet with the institutions approval: nothing is too structured, nothing is forced and the characters are allowed to express themselves largely free of the imposition of pushing forward a story. The results are mixed: it is maddeningly lax, rambling and even a touch self indulgent but the participants really pull something out of themselves: Tenant immediately establishes the charisma that got Laing attention; Byrne and Gambon are compelling as two of his patients. Like Laing's therapy not much is resolved or advanced, but the sense of having gone through an intense experience is strong.
