117 min | R | January 10, 2020 | IFC Films
A psychologist gathers three asylum patients who each believe they are Jesus Christ and puts them in a room together. His theory is that three messiahs cannot survive looking each other in the eye. The premise is a knife, and the movie keeps holding it by the blade.
Dr. Alan Stone is a psychologist who believes the asylum is broken. He arrives at a Michigan state hospital in 1959 carrying a theory and a tape recorder. He gathers three patients who each believe they are Jesus Christ and seats them at the same table. His plan is that forcing each man to confront the others’ identical claim will crack the delusion open. The film takes a genuinely strange clinical case and flattens it into a tidy lesson about institutional cruelty and the dignity of the mad.
Richard Gere plays Stone as a man who never doubts himself, and the film never makes him pay for it. Peter Dinklage plays Joseph with clipped British diction and the bearing of a deposed aristocrat rather than a patient in crisis. Walton Goggins plays Leon as the most volatile of the three, twitching between menace and panic in the same breath. Bradley Whitford plays Clyde as the quietest of the men, a near-silent presence the script forgets for long stretches. Charlotte Hope plays Becky, Stone’s research assistant, and the film saddles her with a harassment subplot that exists to make Stone look heroic. Julianna Margulies plays Ruth Stone with little to do but absorb her husband’s moods, and Kevin Pollak plays Dr. Eldrich Orbus as the obstructive administrator the story needs.
Jon Avnet directs from a script he writes with Eric Nazarian. The camera crowds the patients during the group sessions and locks the actors into tight two-shots that prize faces over the space between them. The lighting keeps the ward warm and golden when the material calls for something colder and more clinical. The score arrives early on every emotional beat and tells the audience what to feel before the scene earns it. Avnet stages the confrontations among the three men as set pieces and then dissolves each one into sentiment.
The case at the center of this film is real and bottomless. Three men holding the same impossible identity in one room is a setup that should produce vertigo. The film treats it as a parable about a decent doctor battling indecent institutions. It chooses the easy reading at every turn and leans on the cast to supply the depth the writing withholds. The actors are better than the movie built around them.