Summary:

James Norton travels from Boston to Paris at his domineering mother's urging to bring home his fragile sister, Ellie, and their journalist brother, Rafael. He discovers Rafael devastated by the death of his Jewish lover, Olympe. Suicide, accident, or murder? Ellie is confined to a wheelchair owing to an unexplained paralysis. James is drawn into finding solutions to both problems and his investigations lead him to seedy brothels, the bureau of a hypnotist, the morgue of aspiring neurologists, and the wards of la Salpetrière, the famous neuropsychiatric hospital for women. The autopsy reveals that Olympe had been pregnant and the questions about her death multiply. The exoneration and return to France of Dreyfus plays as a backdrop.

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Set in the 1950s Eisenhower era, this film creates an enlarged snapshot of a model suburban household in Connecticut as well as a companion negative of two suppressed social issues lurking beneath the painfully smooth surface. In his effort to portray dominant values, as well as the melodramatic look and feel of the period, Director Hayes appropriates visual effects and music associated with fifties films by Douglas Sirk such as "All That Heaven Allows" with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Colors are too vivid; music heavily underlines emotional elements; and stylistically designed sets reflect superficial ideals. Too perfect.

Moving from the margins and into the center two disruptive shadows gradually emerge, one dealing with race, the other with homosexuality. In the years preceding racial protests and riots and in a time when few could imagine public conversation about sexual orientations, use of condoms, or AIDS, the story reveals unspeakable abuses, intolerances, and injustices that have subsequently been addressed but not resolved.

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Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was born in Switzerland in 1926. She was part of a package deal--a triplet (and a two-pounder at that). That she survived the birth (as did her two sisters, another two pounder and a more robust six pounder) is something of a miracle. As she explains, her early childhood was filled with other more memorable experiences around death as well, including a long battle with pneumonia and deathbed scenes of neighbors in her small town.

In the aftermath of World War II, she was a volunteer in IVSP, International Voluntary Service for Peace. She spent time in Poland and then Germany, aiding survivors of the concentration camps, as well as the defeated Germans, to rebuild their lives. She returned to Switzerland and went to medical school, eventually marrying an American student studying there.

After practicing as a small town family doctor, she came to the U.S. in the 1950s. Her plans to serve a residency in pediatrics were changed to psychiatry (because they didn’t want someone who was pregnant). In Denver, after residency, she was asked to lecture to medical students. She chose a topic that was out of the ordinary, but something she felt at home with--death and dying.

In 1965, in Chicago, she continued her work in this area. At the urging of some theology students she began a weekly seminar with dying patients, health professions students, (and eventually ) their more skeptical teachers. This experience led to the publication, in 1969, of her book, On Death and Dying. It is in this book that the "stages" of dying are discussed. The remainder of The Wheel of Life deals with more controversial aspects of Kubler-Ross’s life.

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The documentary film opens with the filmmaker, Susan Smiley, in search of her mother, Millie, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and who, once again, has disappeared into the woefully inadequate public health care system of middle America. Through old photographs and home movies, interviews with family members and health care professionals, and voice-over and direct narration by Smiley herself, the film chronicles the descent of a young, beautiful woman in her twenties into severe and chronic mental illness.

When Millie’s marriage to their father fails, Susan and her younger sister, Tina, are essentially abandoned to endure severe physical and emotional abuse by their mother. As the years unfold, Millie eventually loses her home and embarks on a journey of evictions, arrests, hospitalizations, and homelessness. At what seems to be Millie’s lowest point, warehoused in a nursing home where she is angrily refusing to take any medication, her daughters intervene, petition for guardianship, and navigate the system on behalf of their mother.

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Doctors Everett and Mimi Menlo are psychiatrists living in Toronto. The married couple sleeps in separate beds. They vow never to work as a team or in the same medical facility. Each doctor is deeply troubled by a patient who refuses to communicate. For Mimi, it is Brian Bassett, an eight-year-old boy with autism who eventually dies under her care. For Everett, it is Kenneth Albright, a hospitalized patient with severe paranoid schizophrenia who has attempted suicide four times.

Kenneth's dreams were once complex and intriguing but lately they lack detail and variety. One morning, he is found covered with blood but has no signs of injury. Despite a thorough investigation, it remains a mystery as to whose blood it really is. Following that strange occurrence, Everett experiences insomnia, but he is reluctant to admit the cause to Mimi. She worries that he might be having a nervous breakdown.

In truth, he fears dreaming. He has recurrent nightmares of a bloody Kenneth kneeling next to the bodies of strangers. Everett suspects that Kenneth has placed these corpses in his dreams. Everett finally tells Mimi about his nightmares. He shocks her with the revelation that Kenneth Albright has genuine bloodstains on his clothing and hands every day even though he is still confined to the psychiatric ward. There is only one spot Kenneth can escape to--dreams. After their conversation, Mimi falls asleep and dreams of Brian Bassett. She wakes up and finds Everett in the bathtub. His pajamas are saturated with blood. Mimi promises Everett, "I'm waiting here . . . until we both wake up" (596).

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One of Campo's projects has been to interrogate the methods used by physicians to understand patients. These methods can be expertly employed to hone in on certain diseases and pathologies, but can also come with a price, most notably a blindness to that patient's experience and personhood. Campo's message might be, It's hard to see the big picture through a microscope.

In this sonnet, he turns to the mental status exam. The inadequacy of a dualist perspective of mind and brain and the reductionism of simple interpretations are the starting point. Campo then turns to several questions from the Feinstein mental status exam (remembering three objects, interpreting a phrase, etc.). Ever attuned to the life of being a physician, Campo has captured the embarrassed way in which many of the (very simple) questions are asked ("Just two more silly questions").

He does grant the divergence of mental experience, with the reminder that the mind is "timeless, dizzy, unscrupulous" as well as "sometimes only dimly lit," and acknowledges the limits of the mental status exam, one in which a certain type of memory is tested (three objects) but not another (that the patient might sing).

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The physician-narrator recounts two unsettling house calls made three decades earlier when he began his medical practice in a remote part of Virginia. The doctor is asked to see Alan Jordan at the request of his wife, Judith. They live with their son and three elderly female relatives in a deteriorating house on a secluded estate known as Jordan's End. The Jordan clan is notorious for marrying their own relatives, but Alan wedded someone outside the family.

Judith is beautiful, and in the doctor's eyes, ethereal. Alan's infirmity began 3 years ago with brooding and melancholy but has now progressed to episodes of withdrawal alternating with agitation. A renowned psychiatrist from Baltimore evaluates Alan, deems his condition incurable, and recommends institutionalization.

Mental illness and insanity--the result of heredity and inbreeding--seem to affect all the Jordan men. Alan's grandfather and two uncles are in an asylum. His father died in one. After the narrator examines Alan, he gives Judith a bottle of opiate medication to help ease her husband's restlessness.

The doctor is soon called back to Jordan's End. He finds Alan's dead body in bed covered by a linen sheet and notices that the full bottle of medicine he left only two nights previously is now empty. The doctor cannot decide whether or not Judith has killed her husband nor does he really want to know.

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This is the house of Bedlam. So begins the strong poem by Elizabeth Bishop, the woman who wrote of that wretched old man who lived in the house of Bedlam. "This is the man / that lies in the house of Bedlam." So go the two lines of the following stanza of the 1950 poem about the cranky old man who was kept for his crimes in the house of Bedlam. "This is the time / of the tragic man" begins the three lines of the following stanza of the nursery rhyme poem by the consummate poet who wrote of "the Jew in a newspaper hat / that dances joyfully down the ward" and the brilliantly cruel and crazy man who lived in the house of Bedlam.

"This is the soldier home from the war. These are the years and the walls and the door." So starts the 12th and last stanza of the metrical rhyming repetitive poem by one of the finest American poets about Ezra Pound, an American poet, who found himself at the end of the war "walking the plank of a coffin board" and because of his treason becoming the man--the tragic, talkative, wretched and tedious man--who lived in the house of Bedlam. [79 lines]

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Simon Dykes is a successful artist about to open another big show of his work in London. A week before the opening, he goes out to a bar with his colleagues, indulges in drugs, has sex with his girlfriend, and falls into an uncomfortable sleep with bizarre dreams. He wakes up in a world where every person is a chimpanzee and where humans are kept in zoos or are experimented on in labs, and the few humans surviving in the wild are close to extinction.

Terrified and dismayed, he is taken to a psychiatric ward where the chimpanzee doctors try to help him overcome his "delusions" that he is actually a human. They eventually turn to Dr. Zack Busner, an alpha male, theoretical renegade and media star, as well as a maverick drug researcher, "anti-psychiatrist," psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. Together they try to understand the root of Simon's delusion and return Simon to his sanity and "chimpunity."

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This film by Danish filmmakers focuses on two Scots, Wilbur (Jamie Sives) and his older, considerate brother Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who own a family buy-and-sell bookshop, North Books, in Glasgow. The opening movie credits intersperse with Wilbur's suicide attempt by pills and gassing himself. Wilbur's attempt is thwarted first by the fact that he has to put more coins into the apartment gas meter, and then by his brother, whom Wilbur had telephoned just before losing consciousness. Wilbur continues suicide attempts throughout much of the movie, with methods that range from the absurd to the disturbingly tragic.

The brothers' father had recently died and several scenes occur at a hillside cemetery. Surrounded by imposing stone monuments, the brothers' parents are buried without markers, but with a view, if you cock your head and imagine, of the bookshop. The tragedy of the mother's death when Wilbur was only 5 years old, is invoked to explain much of Wilbur's disturbance.

Early in the movie, Alice (Shirley Henderson), a waif-like single mother who cleans the operating and trauma theatres and sells books she finds at the hospital to the bookshop, is introduced, along with her soon to be 9 year old daughter, Mary (Lisa McKinlay). Alice and Harbour wed, and Mary presciently plunks a penguin eraser she has just received atop the wedding cake next to the bride and groom: "That's Wilbur," she says.

Two hospital workers feature prominently in the film. Horst (Mads Mikkelsen) is a Danish ex-pat physician and "senior psychologist." He chain smokes, distances himself from the group therapy he supposedly supervises, and yet deftly discusses bad news with Harbour in several scenes. The psychiatric nurse, Moira (Julia Davis), however, who, with ever-changing hairstyles and inappropriate nurse-patient interactions, acts primarily as comic relief, delivers the same bad news with unthinking, devastating directness.

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