Review of Frances (1982) by Edith N — 02 Oct 2008

Mental health institutions have gotten better, and fewer people need to go into them. With the advent of modern medications, most mentally ill people can be treated as outpatients, and electroshock doesn't get used nearly as often. Lobotomies, even fictional ones like this one, are right out. (My Gods, we still don't understand the brain, but this loon was willing to do ten lobotomies in an hour that were little more than wiggling an ice pick around someone's brain!) We don't have to worry about the horrors of the old-school institution anymore. To be sure, I'm not sure how accurate the portrayal here is--I like to hope that there were no gang rapes of psychiatric patients in institutions in the 1950s.

Frances Farmer was an actress. She preferred stage to screen, but she did both. And Hollywood trapped her, as did her own slightly Communistic leanings. She was held hostage, and she didn't like it. So she lashed out, because she seemed never to have learned how to deal with people. It seems one can, at least in part, blame her mother for that. She was raised to be strong-willed and independent, but she was not raised to be diplomatic. Unfortunately, diplomacy was the more important skill for a woman in her time and place, and since she didn't have it, things went very badly indeed for her. She was declared mentall ill, hospitalized, escaped, was rehospitalized, and so on. In the film, it spirals downhill to a lobotomy.

Other than that one detail, which is false, I cannot speak to the true-storyness of the film. The lives of most performers are not something I put a lot of time and energy into researching. Apparently, however, it's not terribly close. It is at least loosely based on a fictionalized biography; the director apparently said he didn't want to "nickle and dime people to death with facts." (I don't want to watch the commentary to find out.) This is the kind of attitude that simply drives me crazy. Bad enough to horrify us with a procedure that this particular woman didn't suffer; how much worse to create a fictional love interest? Surely the woman had real love interests in her life who could have filled that spot!

The acting, however, is superb. Jessica Lange does an outstanding job of portraying this woman, whoever she is. (She met her significant other, Sam Shepard, on the set; he played that aforementioned fictional love interest, and quite well indeed.) Kim Stanley gives Lillian Farmer a shrewish quality with just the right twist of desperation. This is a woman living through a daughter and thinking she's living for her. Bart Burns as Ernest Farmer is a sad, hopeless man unable to help his daughter or hold back his wife. Looking at this family, one understands plainly how Frances ended up as she did. Indeed, both actresses were Oscar-nominated for their performances here; interestingly, Stanley lost to Lange for [i]Tootsie[/i]; Lange lost to that Streep woman for [i]Sophie's Choice[/i].).

So was the Frances Farmer we see here really mentally ill? She assuredly wasn't ill enough to be locked up; I think that goes without saying. But the question is, was she experiencing mania, paranoia, or some other symptom--or was she just unable to handle her purely justified anger at a system--several of them!--intended to force her to conform to another's will? It's not an easy question, and it's one the movie leaves entirely in our hands. Rather than a lobotomy, however, it's interesting to speculate what talk therapy, including discussion of her anger issues, would have produced.