Review: Obvious and Ill-Paced, 'Three Christs' is a Near Miss

First screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017, "Three Christs," - Jon Avnet's fictionalized account of Milton Rokeach's study of a trio (perhaps trinity is a better word) of paranoid schizophrenics housed at a state hospital in Michigan - finally reaches cineplexes.

The film stars Richard Gere as Dr. Alan Stone (the story's version of Rokeach); Kevin Pollak as the hospital's slightly hostile director, Dr. Orbus; a sorely-underused Julianna Margulies as Dr. Stone's wife, Ruth; Stephen Root as Dr. Stone's ally, Dr. Bill Rogers; and, in the starring roles, Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins, and Bradley Whitford.

The film opens with Dr. Stone, looking haggard and sporting facial contusions, dictating his own version of events and claiming he's innocent of accusations that have been brought against him, so no bones are made about things having somehow gone awry. Because this is a movie about three men who believe they are Jesus, one might suspect right off that we're in for some sort of heavy-handed sacrifice allegory.

That's exactly the case, as it turns out, though in itself that did not necessarily need to be a bad thing; the film unfolds across a year and a half, from 1959 - 1960, a time when psychiatry was much more prone to brutal (some might say brutisn) practices such as electroshock and lobotomies. (Gay men with any sense of what our community suffered at the hands of the psychiatric profession back in the bad old days will shudder in sympathy for our triptych of title characters.)

But this movie doesn't have the sturdiness it needs to deliver anything too overt, on the nose or heavy of hand. On the contrary, "Three Christs" feels ill-paced, its beats too obvious and its subtler currents relegated to the margins.

The movie's narrative thinness begins with Dr. Stone's initial interest in putting the three Christs together for the purposes of studying them. He offers a plausible-sounding rationale for it: How will their mutually exclusive delusions play out if brought into such proximity for a prolonged period of time? Will they cancel each other out? Will some Christ complexes crumple while only one remains? (An unspoken, but intriguing, alternative is that the three will find some sort of mutuality - a kind of apotheosis, so to speak, that embraces a Hindu-like multi-faceted Christ in three persons. Alas, the movie doesn't go there.) The powers that be are skeptical of this idea, and its therapeutic value, and frankly so are we. No convincing reasons are brought forward to present any sort of scientific thesis for this experiment, leaving a sour taste in the implied notion that Dr. Stone might just be putting together some sort of personally amusing sideshow.

To be fair, the script, by Avnet and Eric Nazarian, doesn't let the movie drift there. Each of the three patients - they are named Joseph (Dinklage), Clyde (Whitford), and Leon (Goggins) - has significant trauma in his past to account for his mental state. The actors each bring a distinctive style and intelligence to their characters so that even in their madness they seem to possess individual methods; one man needs to wash constantly, looking to dispel a "stench" that no one else can detect (shades of baptism's power to cleanse sin), while another struggles with the scars inflicted by a religiously zealous mother. Goggins might have the hardest task: His character is penetratingly perceptive and confrontational, always looking for the seams and weakness of Dr. Stone and his assistant, a young woman named Becky (Charlotte Hope). There are moments when things get a little too Hannibal Lecter-ish, but Goggins and Avent wisely pull back and keep Leon's hostile brilliance germane to the story at hand.

What Avnet and co-writer Nazarian don't manage is a sense of cohesion. Dr. Stone adopts increasingly unusual strategies in his quest to treat the three patients, to the point of selectively affirming their delusions, but the ethical qualms around those strategies are too quickly eclipsed instead of generating sufficient dramatic suspense. The same goes for other dramatic developments, including the strain Dr. Sone's work puts on Ruth, and Ruth's incipient jealousy when it comes to Becky. A couple of sitcom-style moments are all these rich dramatic veins seem to warrant (including one passage in which Ruth's fears are summarized by her getting drunk with friends and then shrugged off when Stone, in full patriarchal mode, commands her to lay off the hooch).

The one character who definitively cuts through it to the film's intellectual and emotional core is Dr. Abraham (Jane Alexander), a well-respected authority who refuses to let Stone bullshit her or himself. Reacting to his unorthodox treatment strategy, Dr. Abraham puts it to Dr. Stone like this: "You're telling me, and the entire psychiatric hierarchy, to go fuck itself," she states. Then: "I like that."

So do we - when it feels like the reason for it is a passion for the Christs, and a deep concern for their welfare. That is a sense that comes across more often than not, but it's not consistent, and its inconsistencies, while another potential source of true drama, are not effectively exploited. We're never actually sure that the patients, despite signs of progress, have any true hope of significant improvement, let alone salvation - and that, regrettably, is the same impression one comes away about the film itself.

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Available on DVD & Blu-ray now from IFC