Helen Blu-ray Review
Ashley Judd is quietly impressive as a music teacher suffering from clinical depression.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 25, 2011
What causes mental illness? That has been one of the most unsettling questions in the entire history of medicine, even before the sciences (and/or arts, depending on your point of view) of psychiatry and psychology came along. I've wrestled with this question myself in my decades' long research into what is still probably the most famous case of mental illness to visit Hollywood, the sad, semi-triumphant story of Frances Farmer. Frances was high strung, outspoken, incredibly intelligent and did not suffer the fools of La-la land easily or in fact willingly. But what led to her devastating mental breakdown? Too much drink? Too much Benzedrine, the speed of that era? A series of failed romantic encounters, including with her ex-husband Leif Erickson and lovers Clifford Odets and Harold Clurman? Or was it something genetic, a ticking bomb of insecurity and instability which finally exploded under the pressures of the star system and Frances' own difficult temperament? Who knows what ultimately led Frances over the edge into an abyss of madness, institutionalization and a life that never really fully recovered, despite her valiant efforts to maintain emotional equilibrium after her release from Western State Hospital in Washington. There are no easy answers, but those questions kept springing up in my mind again as I watched
Helen, a film starring Ashley Judd as the titular heroine, a music professor who finds herself in the grip of a chronic depressive disorder. Helen, the character, is a woman seemingly with everything. She's beautiful, she has a successful career, a semi-well adjusted teen daughter from a previous marriage, and a current marriage that seems to be running on all cylinders. And yet she finds herself alone, dissociative and almost hysterical, an hysteria which ultimately devolves into a semi-catatonic state which results in her hospitalization. What possibly could cause something this devastating? As in the case of Frances Farmer,
Helen (to its credit) doesn't offer any
Dr. Phil-esque rubrics to explain what its main character is going through.
There has been a longstanding Hollywood tradition to treat mental illness with an almost Grand Guignol aspect, even when a particular film, as in the critically revered
The Snake Pit, attempts an authoritative, even clinical, tone. Probably the worst example of this excess is the fictionalized and over the top Lange feature about Farmer herself,
Frances, a film that invents so many aspects about the actress' illness (including the shocking lobotomy scene, something that never happened in real life) that it's hard after a while to take anything in the film very seriously, despite its relentlessly depressing narrative arc.
Helen takes almost an opposite tack, in fact seeming to suffer almost from clinical depression itself. There's nothing overtly showy here, other than perhaps the occasionally over-dramatic supporting turn by Lauren Lee Smith as Mathilda, a student of Helen's who suffers from bipolar disorder. Instead, this is a slow slog through the shadowy world of an emotionally defeated heroine. For some this may make
Helen too slow and laborious to ever generate much interest. For others, however, this may be
Helen's actual saving grace.
Helen is a film that doesn't play mental illness to the filmic rafters, as it were. It's quiet, unassuming and often, in the hands of director Sandra Nettelbeck and leading actress Ashley Judd, gently devastating.
This is not to say
Helen isn't without its flaws, because it is certainly a problematic film on several levels. Its resolute refusal to really delve into what's going on with its titular characterdespite a passing reference or two to her failed first marriage and emotional problems after the birth of her daughterultimately casts the film as a sort of "travelogue" of madness without any tour guide to help us understand what exactly we're seeing. The mirroring of Helen's predicament with Mathilda's is on it surface shallow and self-serving, providing Helen with the only anchor she's able to hold on to despite being surrounded by a coterie of people who are attempting to help her. Goran Visnjic portrays David, Helen's understanding second husband, but the character is not fully drawn or in fact explored enough within the context of what he sees happening to his wife to ever fully bring the dramatic interplay between the married couple alive. Instead, like the audience itself, David seems to be an impotent, passive observer.
Helen also in its sort of quietly subversive way plays with the fringes of Hollywood's Grand Guignol tradition by having Helen resort to electroshock therapy, long the bugaboo of films about mental illness. As shocking (sorry, pun intended) as it may be to realize, electroshock therapy has been proven to be effective in at least some cases, though like so many "treatments" from the mid-20th century on, it has probably been over prescribed and used without regard to the needs of individual patients.
Helen thankfully doesn't go the
Frances or
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest route here, with a patient strapped down against their will and electrocuted into mental oblivion. But still the distasteful scent of hyperbole wafts over these scenes, despite the best efforts of Nettelbeck not to sensationalize them, something which may in fact be as much a function of how this therapy has been portrayed for so long as it is about how this film handles the subject.
Ultimately
Helen rises and falls on the quality of its performances, and for the most part there's exceptional work to be seen, if not exactly enjoyed, here. Ashley Judd manages to portray the devolution of Helen's competency without any actorly tics or tricks, and that very naturalness is by far the best thing about the film. The entire supporting cast does well, though the writing does venture into a few too many clich-ridden alleys, such as Mathilda's fetal positions and sudden outbursts, that there's really only so much they can do without betraying the artifice of the screenplay. Two aspects of this film are truly extraordinary, though they may not be instantly noticeable to casual viewers. The cinematography by German DP Michael Bertl is unapologetically gorgeous, filled with a lush, backlit beauty that perfectly depicts Helen's shadowy internal world. And the score by Tim Despic and James Barker is moody and quite effective, aided by some judicious uses of classical source cues.
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