Altered States Blu-ray Review
Half a Good Movie Is Better Than None
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, July 6, 2012
Altered States may no longer be widely known, but it makes a strong impression on its fans. The
creators of the highly regarded TV series
Fringe (now filming its fifth and likely final season) were so impressed that they borrowed
major elements from the film: the use of sensory
deprivation tanks combined with hallucinogens to unleash dormant mental powers; the belief that
thought alone could open doors to other realities; and the actress Blair Brown portraying a
brilliant woman hopelessly devoted to a possibly mad scientist who can never fully requite her
love. But
Fringe is only the most recent and sustained in a long line of
homages, both serious and satirical, to
Altered
States. Once seen, it's a film that's hard to shake.
Not that its original creative team didn't try. The film's screenwriter, three-time Oscar winner
Paddy Chayevsky (
Network), who had adapted his one and only novel from a long career of
writing for TV, film and theater, took his name off the project in protest at the final result; the
film's screenwriter is now listed as "Sidney Aaron". Arguments with Chayevsky had already led
to the exit of the film's first director, Arthur Penn (
Bonnie and Clyde). The original studio,
Columbia Pictures, dumped the project when the budget grew beyond initial projections. Warner
Brothers picked up the film and proceeded with director Ken Russell, who would later claim he
was the twenty-seventh choice and whose disputes with Chayevsky, along with reportedly bad
behavior on the set, would damage his career for years to come.
In retrospect, there's tragic irony in the clash between Russell and Chayevsky, because they
shared the same passion for overstatement, though in different registers, Chayevsky being more
satirical, while Russell was more fantastical and bizarre. Unfortunately they also shared the same
insistence on being in charge (or, at least,
thinking they were; Russell would later claim that all of Chayevsky's previous directors were
"malleable", but I doubt that anyone other than Sidney
Lumet was in charge of
Network). The two combatants needed an old-style producer from the
heyday of the studio system to ride shotgun on both of them. Maybe then they could have done a
better job reconciling the conflicting strands in
Altered States than Russell was able to do by
himself. Chayevsky had written a critique of the search for ultimate truth, but Russell, who had
converted to Catholicism, understood the allure of such things—and also knew how to make that
allure both creepy and fascinating, like all the best villains in horror movies. Russell succeeded
so well that at times
Altered States verges on self-parody, and by the end he has no satisfactory resolution to the story; so he winds it
up quickly and rolls the credits.
In 1967, a medical prodigy, Dr. Eddie Jessup (William Hurt), is an associate professor of
abnormal psychiatry at the Cornell Medical College in New York, where he becomes convinced
that the schizophrenic patients he's studying aren't "mad" but have access to alternate planes of
reality. Jessup and a colleague, Dr. Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban), begin experimenting with a
flotation tank for sensory deprivation to induce a similar mental state in non-schizophrenics,
including Jessup himself, on a temporary basis. Jessup takes to the experience with a delight that
should sound warning alarms.
At a party given by Arthur and his wife, Sylvia (Dori Brenner), Jessup meets Emily (Blair
Brown), another prodigy but in the field of anthropology. She's beautiful and intriguing, and
when Jessup asks to go home with her, she says yes, because he's intense and on fire. When
they're making love, she asks him what he's thinking about. He answers: "God. Jesus.
Crucifixions."—and Emily is hooked.
They marry, because Emily wants it. They get teaching positions at Harvard, move to Boston and
seven years pass, during which two children are born (one of them played by Drew Barrymore, in
her first film). Jessup chafes under the appearance of normalcy: husband, father, respectable
professor. Then, an anthropologist friend at the University of Mexico, Echeverria (Thaao
Penghlis), tells him about an obscure Mexican tribe whose members prepare a potion from a rare
mushroom that is supposed to induce "a common experience in all users". Jessup accompanies
Echeverria on an expedition to visit the tribe, where the Brujo (Charles White-Eagle) allows him
to take part in the ceremony of consumption. Jessup experiences extreme hallucinations replete
with images of Emily and religious portents. The next morning, Jessup isn't exactly sure
what happened, but he leaves with a sample of the potion for Arthur to analyze and synthesize.
Back in Boston, Jessup and Arthur locate another sensory deprivation tank, and the potent
combination of the tank and the drug takes Jessup into dangerous new realms. Each experience
unleashes more energy, as Jessup's visions begin exhibiting physical manifestations. Jessup's
friend and skeptical colleague, Dr. Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), keeps proposing rational
explanations, but they have the frantic tone and increasing volume of a man who's desperately
trying to convince
himself.
In the midst of this deteriorating situation, Emily returns from an African field trip on which the
children have accompanied her, and she demands that her husband stop his experiments.
Naturally Jessup refuses, and his final effort to explore the mysteries of the universe goes so far
that it literally generates a primal vortex (
Fringe fans, take note!) into which he disappears—and Emily follows.
Director Russell deploys all his formidable talents as a visual stylist to bring Jessup's visions to
life, including rapid, almost subliminal cuts, odd superimpositions, lurid color schemes, Dick Smith's remarkable make-up effects, on-set
pyrotechnics, snakes and lizards, and much
more. When the visions begin to externalize, an array of practical effects come into play,
including the astonishing agility of Miguel Godreau, a former lead Alvin Ailey dancer sometimes
known as "the Black Nureyev", who leaps, run and swings through a varied landscape portraying
a character identified in the film only as "Primal Man".
But all of these elaborate effects wouldn't work—even now, there's a strong temptation at points
to cry out, "Oh come
on!"—except for the performances, especially the portrayal of Jessup by
William Hurt, who was making his film debut. Jessup could have easily been an unlikeable, self-absorbed jerk, an R.D. Laing on amphetamines, but
Hurt finds a way to make him fascinating, even sympathetic. Yes, Jessup is such a classic mad scientist that he can sit there watching his own body
pulse and transform, like Max Renn's in
Videodrome
, while grimacing in agony and simultaneously grinning at the sheer joy of discovery. But on their first night together, Jessup also tells Emily
how he lost his religious faith after watching his father die a lingering, miserable death from cancer, and Hurt manages to convey both the depth of
Jessup's suffering and the degree to which it has informed his life ever since. (In the first major hallucination sequence, Jessup's dying father features
prominently.) A tearful Emily says late in the film, "I was never
real to him. Nothing in the human experience is
real to
him." Yet Hurt's performance conveys a more complex sense of Jessup than Chayevsky's dialogue, a sense that the human experience was all
too real for him—so much so that he's devoted his life to looking for something solid, permanent and primal.
Ultimately, though,
Altered States ends before satisfactorily completing its story. Having taken Jessup to the point where he appears to
have reached the end of his quest, where even Mason can
no longer deny that something extraordinary has happened—"What we saw tonight was a
physical phenomenon, an inexplicable physical phenomenon!" shouts Arthur—the film needs a
whole second part, or at least a third act, showing how the characters deal with the new reality, or
at least conclude that some borders weren't meant to be crossed (as they say on
Fringe) and then make a joint decision to abandon
this research and never speak of it again.
Chayevsky probably wasn't interested in writing such a third act. For him it was sufficient to
demonstrate the dangers of seeking absolute truth. He hadn't counted on Russell and Hurt
making it so damn enticing. So all we get are a few lines of dialogue to tie off the story of Eddie
and Emily Jessup. Every time I see the film, the ending leaves me unfulfilled, but getting there is
a lot of fun.
Altered States Blu-ray, Video Quality
I saw
Altered States when it first appeared in theaters in December 1980, and I still remember the experience vividly. The image on
Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a faithful rendition,
but it's likely to strike new viewers as unusually dark. Rest assured that it's supposed to be. The
cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, was just a few years away from shooting
Blade Runner,
another dark movie; Cronenweth was never afraid of dialing down the lighting on a scene,
because he knew how to capture good detail and appropriate shadows even with minimal
illumination.
The purpose of the darkened scenes should be evident from the film's opening shot, which shows
Jessup's face distorted through the window of the flotation tank in New York, surrounded by a
bright blue-green light. Darkness and flat, dull colors in the everyday world establish a strong
contrast with the brightly lit and intense, often psychedelic colors of Jessup's alternate
universe(s). Indeed, one never knows where light will fall around Jessup, and whether it will be
false or hallucinatory. When Emily first sees him at Arnold and Sylvia Rosenberg's party, Jessup
is entering from outside, and he's bathed in a brilliant, white light as if he had just descended
from heaven. The effect is both hokey and startling, but it aptly conveys the effect that the
handsome young visionary has on Emily. A later and more elaborate sequence that recalls the
"star gate" journey in Kubrick's
2001 (but with imagery that's more organic and less
geometrically abstract) uses vividly saturated color to convey the depth of Jessup's journey to . . .
somewhere else.
Black levels and shadow detail are strong enough so that a tricky nighttime sequence involving a
pursuit in the basement of a Harvard Medical School building and through the streets of Boston
combines precisely the right amount of the visible and the concealed. Contrast levels are
correctly set so that harshly lit and overexposed inserts like the quick shots of Eddie and Emily
Jessup dressed as Victorians in Eddie's Mexican hallucination don't have their detail blown out.
In motion, though not so readily in screencaps, the film's grain structure does not appear to have
been artificially reduced or otherwise manipulated, although the image is frequently softened by the numerous opticals and other requirements of
effects in the pre-CG era. I didn't spot any compression errors
(but, let's face it, the rapid-fire editing in some sequences could hide a multitude of sins).
