Review of K-PAX (2001) by Edith N — 28 Mar 2010

Hollywood Crazy Person Syndrome at Its Worst.

The thing which confused me most, frankly, was how a planet orbiting a binary star could possibly be dimmer than Earth. Kevin Spacey swans around in Bono's sunglasses (literally), because Earth is just so bright compared to K-PAX, yet he very clearly ought to have less sensitive eyes. (Incidentally, the movie is also quite clear that the name of the planet is in all caps, but no one else seems to realize that.) I don't know enough to get if a lot of the rest of the science is that dodgy, though I think what he says about relativity is and I know what he says about the "Big Crunch" at the end is. However, it feels as though they made up the garbage about the dim light of K-PAX (perpetual twilight, apparently?) in order to come up with another quirky thing he does. And, of course, sunglasses look cool. Though why they had to borrow Bono's I cannot say. Especially weird considering the song which plays over the credits is Sheryl Crow, not U2.

Prot (Spacey) appears in Grand Central Station and is accused of stealing a woman's purse despite the fact that a witness is very firm on the fact that he didn't. Since he claims to be an alien, he gets sent to an institution, because the State of New York can totally afford to pay for institutionalizing all the crazies walking down the street. And Prot ends up under the uncertain aegis of Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), who is of course burned out and neglectful of his family, the better to Learn a Valuable Lesson. There is the usual assortment of mismatched patients who understand more deeply than the so-called normal people assigned to watch over them. There is the debate about whether Prot really is an alien from another planet or actually the rather prosaic Robert Porter of Guelph, New Mexico, with which side you're on in the debate showing how deeply in touch you are with the deeply spiritual world around you.

I find this sort of movie deeply frustrating. It feels as though the sick people, especially the mentally ill, exist in this sort of universe in order to make the healthy people learn a valuable lesson and feel better about themselves. It's also usually the case that only a sick person can help another sick person. It is, so far as I'm concerned, true that it's hard to really understand illness if you aren't ill, but I don't think you can fix someone by empathy. And Prot is very clear on the idea that these people can get better. Really better. And even if they can't, well, it's okay, because Dr. Powell will connect more with his own family through the power of the crazy person, and everything will be better. The mentally ill are somehow mystical, in touch with a deeper truth. Their foibles are laughable and never really serious. The girl who's been in an institution almost her whole life because she won't talk? She'll talk to Prot, and everything will be fine! He'll make the germophobe able to touch things and not have to wear his surgical mask. It'll be great.

And let's talk some about that institution. No one in it really seems to be a danger to anyone. Oh, yes, it's possible that they'd be institutionalized for other reasons, but they wouldn't be in a ward with each other. For one, the ward is co-ed, and they all have their own rooms. Their symptom profiles are wildly different from one another, and hardly any of them have a really common condition. Not a one of them have any of the most common conditions which end in institutionalization. None of these people are schizophrenics. None of them are bipolar. I can see their being institutionalized, some of them, but it would have to be voluntarily or else a ward of the state kind of thing, and I find it very unlikely that they'd be in a ward with someone hauled in off the street. Who is, again, not a danger to anyone, either. They are allowed to put coloured tissue paper over all the windows, and somehow, they get access to a lot of balloons for the going-away party. None of them appear to be on any kind of regular medication, and the only one shown in real treatment is Prot.

You know what it is? It's that I couldn't get into the charm and whimsy. I couldn't get into the entertaining notion that Prot might actually be what he said he was. The debate seemed greatly pointless to me. If he was crazy, he was crazy in a very rare sort of way. So rare, it seems, that he's able to take all his therapy with a psychiatrist. Which I guess is possible if no one else is getting any treatment. They're just being allowed to run about holding essay contests and so forth. (Which, really? That's how you decide who goes to another planet?) No one here is crippled by their illness. They're just whimsically difficult. No, they can't get by in the real world, but they aren't really suffering. They don't even notice they're having problems most of the time, though they're certainly aware of the others' problems. No one bothers doing the research on it. No one understands or even tries to what real mental illness is really like. If anyone in Hollywood--or the film industry in general--even really tried dealing with a real mentally ill person, we'd be less fantastical.