Asylum
David MacKenzie, the Scottish director of Young Adam, brings us Asylum, a 2005 drama based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath. The film was adapted for the screen by Patrick Marber, the screenwriter behind the tremendously enthralling Closer and the equally stunning Notes on a Scandal. It was with high hopes that I went into Asylum having discovered this, as the aforementioned films contained some of the best dialogue and most intriguing situations on screen in quite some time. Unfortunately, Marber’s gift for dialogue and enticing dramatic situations gets lost in the shuffle within the walls of this Asylum. It’s really a shame, too.
The good thing about Asylum is that the first thirty or so minutes, although rather tepid and uninteresting, are not all that bad. Suddenly, however, MacKenzie’s film establishes what could only be described as a frenzied and absurd pace with little or no direction, kind of like a car careening down a windy road with no brakes. At this suggestion, it might sound good. But the car is a real lemon and the hill essentially goes nowhere. Asylum attempts to tackle sexual obsession by playing a mind game with its audience, only somebody forget the “mind” within this game. Asylum is at once pretentious and brainless, a completely hollow “erotic thriller” with moments of such absurd hypertension that it becomes hard to watch without a finger on the fast-forward button.
Asylum is set in Britain in the very early 1960s. Most of the film takes place at a remote asylum that looks like it was built in the Victorian era, with enough dark and cringe-worthy corridors to make Hannibal Lecter feel reasonably at home. Unfortunately, MacKenzie only flirts with the setting here and, despite a few sweeping shots, we are left to imagine what it must be like for the characters to exist within their framework. Nonetheless, the film follows a psychiatrist, Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) and his wife, Stella (Natasha Richardson), as they are the new couple on the block at the asylum. Max gets a job at the asylum and Stella sits around the house attempting to adjust to the bland duties of whatever it is she is supposed to do. For some reason, we are not told why, she does not fit in very well and wanders through the courtyards aimlessly looking for someone….er, something to do.
Like any asylum in the movies, all is not well here. There is a creepy doctor, Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen) with resentment issues towards Max because Max took the promotion Cleave was supposed to get. Cleave is expected to serve as Max’s second in command at the asylum, a post that Cleave resents and certainly makes no bones about it. Fair enough. Meanwhile, Max and Stella appear to be suffering from a bland marriage, as would be the case. Stella eventually stumbles upon an inmate at the asylum, Edgar (Marton Csokas), who is working on some sort of glass house in their backyard after being deemed “safe” by Dr. Cleave. Naturally, Stella’s boredom leads her to a dangerous affair with Edgar and all hells breaks loose in the process. Events spiral out of control, some unintelligibly illogical and most downright silly. In the end, the inevitable happens and the film rolls the credits, mercifully.
Everything important about Asylum is supposed to be in the details, yet the details are so incredibly obvious and clearly directed that little is left in the discovery. Scenes unfold sloppily and then come down to sudden endings without warning or purpose. Phones ring to end one scene and the phone call is imagined to completion in another scene, which is annoying instead of stylishly intellectual. Instead of demanding a lot of its audience and succeeding, Asylum demands its audience to check their brain at the door for most of the film, only to remind them that they might need it later to find their car keys. It’s a sloppy, illiterate mess of a film that loses major points for masquerading as something better.
The performances, sadly, are all so catastrophically over the top that it’s hard not to burst out in laughter when Sir Ian McKellan storms out of a room with pursed lips or when Natasha Richardson continues to wear lipstick that doesn’t suit her face. Asylum could have gone one of two ways, in my opinion. With a little amping up on the camp and toning down of the “serious actor” rhetoric that these performers tried to pull off, the story could have been an entertaining piece of pulp cinema. On the other side, with a diminishment of the silly ideologies – like the idiotic living arrangements that creep up suddenly involving Edgar and some bearded “assistant” – and a clearer path to discover, Asylum could have been an engaging erotic thriller. As it happens, however, it is neither of those two things despite trying to reach out with both hands at elements of the absurd and the stupid.
Asylum is an over-acted, over-directed, poorly written mess of a film. It is a high-class disappointment that is incredibly bland and tepid, save for a few sequences of accidental silliness. Sadly, even Sir Ian McKellan is made to look like a fool in this one. If only he could have channeled Gandalf and whisked us all away.
