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| The gathering storm. |
Madness, true madness, is a terrible thing. I’m talking
about clinical disorders, the kind that most people know little about, even if
they talk a great deal about them. Even scientists would probably admit they’re
only now scratching the surface of psychological disorders, their causes and
their treatments. As laypeople we tend to think of madness as the prototypical
depictions we see in movies or even occasionally in real life on the street. We
see a man muttering to himself in a park, or maybe he’s even shouting at no
one, or everyone, and we point to him and say, “That guy’s crazy.” Movies have
given us the lunatic cast of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the depraved insanity of sociopathic killers in
countless thrillers. But the truth is that very few people are afflicted the
way pop culture would have us believe, and many more suffer quietly through
conditions that might be benign to outsiders or as debilitating and difficult
to witness as schizophrenia.
Michael Shannon shot to mid-level stardom with an Oscar
nomination for playing the emotionally disturbed neighbor in Revolutionary Road, a performance that,
while very good, was still based on a conventional approach to mental illness.
Now take his latest movie, Take Shelter,
which is a character study painting a portrait of a man named Curtis who slowly
unravels before his family and friends. Curtis is a kind of blue collar
everyman. He lives in Ohio, works for a mining company, has a lovely wife and
dutifully learns sign language to communicate with his deaf daughter. But
something is not quite right in his world, signaled by the first image in the
film of Curtis staring toward distant gathering clouds and then hanging around
while the rain soaks him.
