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I was interviewed by the CBC National News about this film, and I was pretty critical so I felt an obligation to actually see it. I went with a friend who promised she wouldn't tell anybody if I laughed a lot. I have to confess that I actually kind of liked the movie. It won't win an Oscar, and it's a very predictable romance in many ways, but it has some unique twists that really appealed to me.
Schizophrenia is only mentioned two or three times per se, and the writers have totally confused it with dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Charlie has two personalities, Hank being the violent one. Hank is a very ineffective violent person. He mostly insults people. It's one thing I like about the film. Both of Charlie's personalities fall in love with the same woman. The woman of course is on the run from some very bad people who are out to kill her. Typically you would have expected Hank to have been a hero of some sort, but both of Charlie's personalities are incompetent when he is very ill. In schizophrenia you find the same pattern, very ill usually translating to untreated and/or noncompliant with medication. Charlie is a newly married Rhode Island Highway patrolman who is cuckolded by a Negro midget. He simply denies that the resulting black triplets aren't his and becomes the laughing stock of the town. Soon everybody is taking advantage of Charlie, who caves in to their abuse. It is this abuse by everybody else that pushes Charlie over the edge, and he develops another personality that is out of his control. If the film is critical of anyone it is not of people with a mental illness, but rather the people who victimize the weak and aggravate their suffering. In Charlie's case ordinary people, beginning with his wife, cause his mental illness, by taking advantage and constantly ridiculing him. The cause of dissociative identity disorder is in fact severe physical, emotional and sexual abuse, but during early childhood. It has always been an intriguing disorder for the public, but it is actually quite rare in real life. The movie confuses the treatment for schizophrenia, medication, as treatment for Charlie's multiple personalities, when in fact dissociative identity disorder is treated with hours and hours of psychotherapy and is a very difficult condition to treat successfully. All said and done though the film normalizes mental illness in many ways as a part of the real world. Even the heroine confides that she has an eating disorder. I especially liked that the teenagers who are often very cruel to one another will see the loser as the hero.
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