I had bypassed a movie called Three Christs several times when scanning through my free site to find things to watch. I saw, by a glance at the description, that the movie had something to do with a psychiatrist treating three men who think they are Jesus Christ, and I just assumed that this would be some sort of lame, and likely insulting comedy at the expense of religious sorts, but I found upon clicking on it last night that it is instead a thoughtful little piece, based, moreover, on a true story.
A Wisconsin psychiatrist, played by a suddenly old and rather strange looking Richard Gere, finds himself treating three patients at an asylum, each of whom believes himself to be Christ. The time is the 1960s, when the common forms of treatment for schizophrenia were electroshock therapy and frontal lobectomy. Gere, a forward-looking, compassionate sort, insists on treating the three men without these brutal interventions.
The first step is to bring the three deluded men, each tending toward antisocial and sometimes aggressive behavior, into a group with just Gere and his female assistant supervising and guiding. There, they are encouraged to interact, cooperate, even form relationships with one another and with the doctors. The experiment starts out rocky, but, to the amazement of the skeptical asylum staff, soon begins to bear the fruit of progress in each patient, a smoothing of the rough edges, a greater willingness to relate and even to befriend.
All this love, compassion, and human kindness seems distinctly threatening to the psychiatric establishment at the asylum, which remains sold on the more immediately effective, not to mention barbaric measures already in practice, and so Gere and his patients run into trouble.
The point in the end is that three Christs are not nearly so much a problem as is a dogmatic, pharisaical, unfeeling system--a system which tends toward crucifixions in the interest of maintaining its own supremacy.
Nonetheless, Christs have a way of rising, thriving, and bringing about change, and so the message conveyed in Three Christs is ultimately an uplifting one.
A Wisconsin psychiatrist, played by a suddenly old and rather strange looking Richard Gere, finds himself treating three patients at an asylum, each of whom believes himself to be Christ. The time is the 1960s, when the common forms of treatment for schizophrenia were electroshock therapy and frontal lobectomy. Gere, a forward-looking, compassionate sort, insists on treating the three men without these brutal interventions.
The first step is to bring the three deluded men, each tending toward antisocial and sometimes aggressive behavior, into a group with just Gere and his female assistant supervising and guiding. There, they are encouraged to interact, cooperate, even form relationships with one another and with the doctors. The experiment starts out rocky, but, to the amazement of the skeptical asylum staff, soon begins to bear the fruit of progress in each patient, a smoothing of the rough edges, a greater willingness to relate and even to befriend.
All this love, compassion, and human kindness seems distinctly threatening to the psychiatric establishment at the asylum, which remains sold on the more immediately effective, not to mention barbaric measures already in practice, and so Gere and his patients run into trouble.
The point in the end is that three Christs are not nearly so much a problem as is a dogmatic, pharisaical, unfeeling system--a system which tends toward crucifixions in the interest of maintaining its own supremacy.
Nonetheless, Christs have a way of rising, thriving, and bringing about change, and so the message conveyed in Three Christs is ultimately an uplifting one.
No comments:
Post a Comment