Butler's Cinema Scene

“TOUCHED WITH FIRE” My rating: B+

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Mental illness is a fairly common topic for the movies, but “Touched With Fire” is something special — a film that puts the viewer in the shoes of the sufferers/celebrants.

Instead of watching from the outside we experience the joys (yes, there are some) and terrors of manic depression.

Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby (one of those familiar faces to whom you cannot put a name) play Carla and Marco, who meet in a psych ward. Both are poets — she’s a published author, he’s into spoken-word performances — and both have gone off their meds.  They soon embark on a romance.

While in the manic phase of their illnesses they are energetic, wildly creative and supremely self-confidant, certain that they are among the blessed few chosen to live life with such glorious intensity. And they believe their relationship is  invulnerable and totally fulfilling.

And then, as it must, the “down” side of their bipolar beings kicks in. It gets ugly.

“Touched With Fire” was written and directed by Paul Dalio, himself a manic depressive. Not only does he nail the disorder’s emotional roller coaster, but he acknowledges that mental illness may be a key to creativity. (“Would we have ‘Starry Night,'” a defiant Marco asks, “if Van Gogh had been on his meds?”)

The film takes the title of Kay Jamison’s 1996  non-fiction best seller which argues that most of history’s great artistic geniuses were manic depressive. (Jamison even shows up late in the film for a somewhat unnecessary cameo as herself.)

Luke Kirby, Katie Holmes

Dalio also examines how the disease affects loved ones. Carla’s mother (Christine Lahti) and Luke’s father (Griffin Dunne) are decent, caring folk forced into the roles of villains, urging their children to take the drugs which leave them in a benumbed, cottonball existence (“I don’t feel like myself any more’) and arguing — quite rationally — that being in the throes of a manic high is precisely the wrong time to fall in love.

There’s also a delicious subtext at work here.  Holmes, of course, was married to Tom Cruise, the poster boy for Scientology who publicly decried psychiatry as an abomination and a crime. One cannot help seeing Holmes’ lacerating performance as a giant middle finger to the controversial religion.

“Touched With Fire’s” potent blend of exhilaration and anguish feels absolutely right while helping us understand what the disorder is all about.

| Robert W. Butler