“Freud said there were two basic instincts, what were they again?” asks Ruth (Julianna Margulies) as she walks into the office of her husband, Dr. Alan Stone (Richard Gere). The moment is emblematic of the impossibly stilted Three Christs, which abounds in the sort of hand-holding dialogue that ensures that the film doesn’t transcend its roots as a psychiatric case study. At least here, though, there’s a touch of playacting in the exchange that points to this being a run-of-the-mill moment in the lives of an undeniably in love couple. Indeed, Margulies and Gere have an easy, playful chemistry that makes you feel that Stone’s answer isn’t just offering audiences helpful context and history.
Jon Avnet’s film is based on The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Polish-American social psychologist Milton Rokeach, the inspiration for Gere’s character. In 1959, Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan who all thought they were Jesus Christ. It was a landmark study of personality, about the fundamental nature of identity, yet the film gives short shrift to the lives of those patients, known here only as Joseph (Peter Dinklage), Leon (Walton Goggins), and Clyde (Bradley Whitford), quirky types who, unconsciously or not, come to see Stone as their savior: from their delusions, from the cruelties of America’s mental health system, and from their also shared romantic interest in the doctor’s unfortunately named assistant, Becky (Charlotte Hope).
At first, Avnet and co-screenwriter Eric Nazarian seem intent on not beating around the bush the way Rokeach did in his case study by directly acknowledging that the man had some kind of god complex. But while we sense the resentment of Stone’s colleagues for what Rokeach described as his “playing god” with his patients, and even get a “four Christs” Freudian slip at one point, everything from the beatific strings of Jeff Russo’s score to Gere’s performance makes clear that sentimentality is the filmmakers’ governing principle. Everyone around the unambiguously good Stone is broken, from his alcoholic wife to his LSD-coveting assistant, and only he can fix them. By the time one of his patients commits suicide in a profoundly hoary and predictable divergence from the record of what happened at the real Ypsilanti State Hospital, it’s as if man’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.
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