“Three Christs” – Too Many [MOVIE REVIEW]
Walton Goggins as “Leon,” Richard Gere as “Dr.Stone,” Peter Dinklage as “Joseph” and Bradley Whitford as “Clyde” in Jon Avnet’s Three Christs. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release. Like Mary McCarthy’s famous quote about Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’” “Three Christs,” a film claiming to be based on fact is as manipulative and dishonest as the study it allegedly recounts. Instead of opening with “Based on actual events,” it should say “Three Christs:” based on actual events that have been completely and totally fictionalized. Written by Jon Avnet and Eric Nazarian based on the book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach and directed by Avnet, “Three Christs” tells the story of an experiment on identity devised by psychiatrist Alan Stone (Richard Gere) in 1959. Stone, discovering that there were three paranoid schizophrenic patients each claiming to be Christ, posited that he might be able to shock them into reality if he brought all three together. An important part of this experiment was to shield them from the allegedly preferred psychiatric treatments of the hospital, electro-shock, and use a strictly “talking cure”…
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