CNS Movie Review: Asylum

Asylum

By Harry Forbes
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- There's a perverse satisfaction in knowing that even talented folks like Natasha Richardson and Sir Ian McKellen can make mistakes like the rest of us mortals.

And so it is that they have lent their histrionic skills to what must have seemed a worthy project on paper: "Asylum" (Paramount Classics), a lurid and somber tale from a novel by Patrick McGrath, set in an English mental hospital in 1960.

A doctor, Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville), has been assigned to a top position there, hoping to take over from retiring Dr. Jack Straffen (Joss Ackland), under the jealous eye of Dr. Peter Cleave (McKellen), who has aspirations of his own.

Max has a wife, Stella (Richardson), elegantly coiffed and stylishly dressed, and a young son, Charlie (Gus Lewis). Max is a fairly priggish and ambitious husband who pays scant attention to his trophy wife, caring more for his career.

One day the bored Stella observes the good-looking handyman, Edgar (Marton Csokas). She learns he's one of inmates, given a little more freedom for good behavior, though as eventually revealed he has a severe personality disorder and fits of morbid jealously, and he's there for having murdered his unfaithful wife. (The description of the murder is gruesome.)

Stella and Edgar's attraction is instantaneous, and after exchanging gardening tips and later dancing together at the annual ball where staff and patients mingle, they commence a heavy-breathing affair. Their sexual tryst on the floor of a greenhouse is extremely graphic, though there's no actual nudity.

They have several follow-up trysts (briefer duration on screen, but some with partial nudity), and before long, after Edgar escapes the hospital grounds because of Stella's negligence, their shenanigans become public. Fearing she might be prevented from seeing him again (because of the machinations of Cleave, whose special interest in Edgar has homoerotic undertones), she runs off, leaving her husband and child for a bohemian life in a London tenement.

There, in grimy beatnik squalor, they listen to jazz records and make love. Edgar has a scruffy devoted sidekick, Nick (Sean Harris). Eventually, Edgar wrongly suspects Nick and Stella are having an affair, and he viciously beats Stella.

Stella is finally apprehended by the police, rescued from this degrading life and returned to her family, but her obsessive love for Edgar continues with ultimately tragic results.

Director David MacKenzie's film, from Patrick ("Closer") Marber's script (written with Chrysanthy Balis) is, as you might have gathered, a peculiar mix of "Anna Karenina" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover." The eroticism of the sexual encounters often suggests the sort of thing cable channels sometimes show after midnight.

Richardson, recently on Broadway in "A Streetcar Named Desire," gives a good performance of a not very plausible (or likable) character in which sexuality and madness again intertwine. Csokas has the requisite manly appeal. Bonneville is, by turns, hateful and pathetic, in his sketchily written part. Besides the reliable McKellen, there's good work from Judy Parfitt as Max's mother and from Ackland.

Though the early parts of the film make Stella's adulterous affair somewhat sympathetic, the plot takes a dark turn fairly early, and the negative consequences of her actions are underscored. On a sociological level, Stella is shown to be a pawn of all the men in her life, explaining -- if not justifying -- her actions.

Even with the melodramatics, the film is rather slowly paced, and never quite believable. Characters behave inconsistently. Max seems like a self-centered macho man, yet repeatedly takes Stella back. Why does Charlie -- who seems to adore Edgar -- rat on the couple to his grandmother?

Though the neglected wife driven to abandon her responsibilities has been used time and again in literature, this is a far cry from Leo Tolstoy and D.H. Lawrence.

The film contains strong sexual content, some of it graphic, partial and rear nudity, rough and crude language, an adultery theme, suicide and violence. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted.

- - -

Forbes is director of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

END

Copyright (c) 2005 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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