Released on DVD in June 2016, Altered Minds is the much-lauded psychological thriller from Generation X auteur Michael Z. Wechsler, whose 1999 comedy, Slaves of Hollywood, was a sly insider's view of the bottom rung of the film industry, an absurdist Swingers. Mr. Wechsler took a decade to bring us Altered Minds (originally titled Red Robin) and, given the craftsmanship on display in the film, it's obvious why it took Mr. Wechsler, who wrote, directed and produced Altered Minds, so long to bring us such a dark, troubling and carefully-made film. Slaves of Hollywood was a lot of fun, a "piss- take," as the Brits say. To describe Altered Minds as Lord Alfred Tennyson might have, here "gloom the dark, broad seas." The film is a great leap forward for Mr. Wechsler and an award-winner: after its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival, Altered Minds won a Jury Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the 2014 Gasparilla International Film Festival and awards for Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography at the Oaxaca Film Festival. It was also an Official Selection at more than 20 festivals worldwide, including Glasgow International Film Festival, Fantasporto Film Festival, Palm Beach International Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival. We may have found ourselves, luckily, in the midst of Mr. Wechsler's great leap forward.
Dr. Nathan Shellner, as played at perfect pitch by underrated American treasure Judd Hirsch, is the paterfamilias of the Shellner family, longtime residents of a leafy, sleepy enclave in suburban Philadelphia. Dr. Shellner, is a loving husband and father and a renowned psychiatrist, the founder of a clinic, and a treatment method, for American veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a physician described by LBJ as "a true American patriot." From this coruscation we wade into the darkness (and yes, read on, what I'm about to tell you certainly shades the film, but your knowledge of it won't minimize the suspense Mr. Wechsler has in store for you): Dr. Shellner was also part of a group of doctors who, for reasons best described in our current parlance as "homeland security," performed mind-control experiments on some of the veterans in their care.
Welcome to American cinema (and television) after Abu Graihb. Torture, once a rarity in most films and shows - or played for laughs, as in the Pit of Despair in The Princess Bride - is a dominant theme, from 24 to the remake of Casino Royale (2006), in which arch villain Le Chiffre, played by Mads Mikkelsen, chains Daniel Craig's 007 (already battered and stripped naked) to a chair and whips his testicles again and again with a thick rope. We have eaten a bitter apple, and its aroma and taste have suffused much of our film culture (Deadpool (2016), anyone?).
What decisions did Shellner make when he permitted the use of his patients as guinea pigs? How did a loving father and a patriot come to participate in the torture of his own countrymen, all for the sake of perfecting torture to be used against whomever our current enemy might be? So Altered Minds, in the person of Dr. Nathan Shellner, asks the question we have been forced to ask ourselves since the discovery of what was done to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graihb: what wrongs are we willing to essay, what sins are we willing to commit, for a greater good and what is that good? If we are each charged with creating our own moral universe with a set of fixed thresholds, thresholds that define who each of us is at the core of his or her being, what makes it possible for us to cross them? Once? Repeatedly? And, regardless of the crimes we may commit against others during travels we swore we'd never embark upon, who are we once we've done so? Every performance in this terrific ensemble piece is carefully measured and pitch-perfect, and none more so than Hirsch's. So Altered Minds is a post-Iraq film because within its narrative torture is a tool and our boundaries, familial and personal in the film and international beyond it, are insecure.
Dr. Shellner has been stricken with lung cancer, and Altered Minds opens on the evening of what may be Dr. Shellner's last birthday party. The cast of characters includes Dr. Shellner's wife, Lillian (Caroline Lagerfelt); the Shellner's one biological child, Leonard (Joseph Lyle Taylor), a psychiatrist who has now runs Dr. Shellner's clinic; Tommy (Ryan O'Nan), a horror writer and Julie (Jaime Ray Newman), a photographer, adopted as siblings by the Shellners, and Harry (C.S. Lee), a concert violinist adopted by the Shellners from Vietnam. Like Almodovar, Mr. Wechsler has a penchant for unique, expressive faces, and much of what's communicated in Altered Minds is done with a shrug or a grimace, with a tear or two but little more, by each member of the film's outstanding ensemble cast.
In a recent review of Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times writes: "More than a century after his birth, Hitchcock remains our contemporary because the world of menace he conjured embodies our deepest, most existential fears. Fears (especially resonant today) that the universe is irrational, that evil lies around the corner, that ordinary life can be ripped apart at any moment by some random unforeseen event
" This is exactly what Mr. Wechsler accomplishes in Altered Minds, and it's all done without gore, CGI
things go bump in the night, but nothing explodes, arrives from space, races across an Australian desert in a go-kart made out of human skulls
it's a thriller, yes, but a very old school thriller, the way Hitchcock and Roman Polanski used to make them. The story is jarring, repeatedly, but the film itself, as an artistic endeavor, never strays from what might be construed from its opening scenes as its raison d'etre, its mission statement.
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