SHINE
Keys to Recovery
Hollywood has chiefly elected to film the biographies of tormented artists over their happier counterparts, presuming that boffo box office was more likely to be generated by the spectacle of Chopin coughing blood over gleaming keys or Van Gogh's demented self-surgery than by Mendelson's tediously contented life. Typically, magna opera like A Song To Remember (l946) and Lust For Life (l956) emphasized the anguish precipitated by the artist's disorderly nature and/or the wounding world.
The scenarios of such fare also featured a stolid by-the-numbers narrative trajectory. Progress from the cradle to a usually untimely grave unfolded with every trauma and triumph canonically in place, as the Great Man struggled to fulfill his vision against the obstacles strewn in his path by fate and the Philistines (women were virtually excluded from the pantheon).(l)
A classic sketch from the Fifties' TV review, Your Show Of Shows, hilariously reprised nearly every bromide of the suffering artist sub-genre. The incomparable Sid Caesar played a composer who has labored for years in impoverished obscurity to complete his masterpiece. On the eve of its debut, a brick falls on his head, rendering him into an instant amnesiac, and he wanders ever farther from home and vocation.
While his Vergessene Symphonie (a title which one suspects sprung from Mel Brooks' demented wit) is growing world famous, the composer deteriorates into terminal bumhood. Then, one dark and stormy night, he hears the strains of his music outside a concert hall. In a flash his memory is restored: he shuffles down the aisle, takes the baton from an amazed conductor, to receive a standing ovation from a weeping crowd which -- if memory serves -- predictably includes his overjoyed wife and kids.
The career of David Helfgott, a prodigiously gifted Australian pianist, was cut short in his twenties by devastating psychotic illness. He spent a decade in obscurity, then took up performing again and married well despite the residual stigmata of his condition. His story easily could have been cinematized into an insipid feelgood Vergessene Symphonie scenario. Luckily Shine, Scott Hicks' compelling account of Helfgott's triumph over adversity, rejects bathos in favor of a distinctive lyrical rigor. Hicks is an Adelaide Emmy-winning documentarian (The Great Wall of Iron [l989]; Submarines: Sharks of Steel [l994]; The Space Shuttle [l994], with one previous feature unreleased in America (Sebastian and The Sparrow, [l990]) to his credit. After an epiphany at a Helfgott recital, Hicks contacted the pianist and his wife, Gillian; overcame the couples' considerable resistance; and remained close to them over ten arduous years until Shine's completion. David is portrayed in the film by Alex Rafalowicz, Noah Taylor, and Geoffrey Rush as, respectively, his childhood, youthful, and adult selves. The three performances articulate exquisitely: Taylor's transformation from adolescent to young adult is exquisitely observed, while those who know the pianist state that Rush has uncannily captured every nuance of his quirky persona.
Jay Tarsi's supple screenplay begins in media res: against a peal of thunder, the adult David Helfgott's profile slides eerily across the screen. His face owns a curious, ravaged beauty -- a blend of Gustave Mahler and James Wood. His offscreen voice speaks in a barely unintelligible babble:
"...So maybe I was a sad cat--was I a sad cat?--I was I was, always kissed them kissed them, yes I did, I did, I did kiss them all kissed them all, nice little cat always always oh ho, oh ho..."
A setting abruptly materializes out of the darkness: David tattered, dripping, peers myopically through the rain-streaked window of a Perth restaurant at a companionable after hours staff get-together around an upright piano. He's brought indoors by a sympathetic waitress, then driven back to a halfway house where another piano and he occupy a drab room, littered with the detritus of the chronically marginal.
One doesn't know him yet, but the opening sequence definitively establishes David's ineffable strangeness, his identification with a creature both vulnerable and endearing, and a crucial longing to reach out to others that belies his offputting outsider demeanor. The scene's aqueous imagery will recur throughout the film, variously resonating with its protagonist's psychic dissolution; his perennial spilling across conventional boundaries; his passion for baths and pools of every sort -- hydrotherapy to his distempered spirit; and a fluid narrative structure which shuttles deftly back and forth between David's life stages.
Shine's fragmented odyssey reveals that the pianist's mother and father were free-thinking Polish Jews who barely escaped the Holocaust. In the childhood sequences, they typically speak little of the catastrophic losses still haunting them. David's father, Peter, obsessively recurs to the memory of his own father smashing a treasured violin -- and presumably his musical aspirations. It's moot whether the man was actually a cruel, competitive authoritarian, or whether Peter has fused his father's introject with the imagos of Nazi persecutors, unconsciously identifying with their aggression as well. Armin Mueller-Stahl shrewdly reads Peter Helfgott as a post-traumatic social isolate; a tormented, tormenting petty tyrant who preaches family solidarity as sole bulwark against an Auschwitz universe, where the strong prevail and the weak are crushed -- "like insects".
All the Helffgot children manifested talent. But David, an obvious prodigy, becomes the focus of Peter's anguished love and thwarted hopes, a messenger sent into the world to redeem his savaged pride. The father's suffocating stewardship comprises a crash course in warped communication theory, replete with Batesonian double-binding and Laingian knots. One moment the oddish, preternaturally dutiful boy is smothered with fulsome praise, scathingly criticized the next; told no one will ever cherish him like his father, then lashed mercilessly by Peter's tongue or fists, especially when he doesn't bring home first prizes. David's mother, a beaten down cipher, is unable to intervene in their damaging intimacy, or soften her husband's paranoid wrath.
At first, Peter allows no one but himself to teach David. But his grandiosity eventually seduces him into letting his guard down and the wider world in. He's envisioned the fiendishly difficult Rachmanoniff Third Piano Concerto as David's (and implicitly his) ticket to greatness. Knowing the task lies far beyond his limited power, he grudgingly brings in a well-regarded professional who tartly refuses Rachmaninoff in favor of Mozart and more rational tutelage, under which David soon flouorishes.
As his fame begins to spread, he meets other supportive adults, like the elderly writer Katherine Susannah Prichard (a luminous Googie Withers). However, relationships with youngsters his own age remain tenuous, a function of his father's xenophobia and, one guesses, the native wariness of peers over such a peculiar bird. Threatened by David's dawning separateness, Peter forbids him to study in America. But several years later, when he orders his son to refuse a scholarship from London's prestigious Royal College of Music, David revolts with Katherine's implicit blessing. He leaves, and Peter angrily totally severs contact.
Amputated from family moorings, David seems to thrive again at the Academy under the wing of another sympathetic teacher, Professor Cecil Parkes (an ever-elegant Sir John Gielgud). Unable to perform because of a stroke, Parkes gently nurtures David's talent, making light of his mounting eccentricities as a signature of genius. It's a frequent, thoroughly understandable misperception of the emotionally troubled prodigy, possibly here abetted by the mentor's own eccentricity.
Parkes' ambitions are infinitely more affirmative of David's selfhood than Peter Helfgott's, but he cannot know the pathological depths behind his pupil's anxious desire to please both him and the absent father for whom David still yearns so desparately. After he determines to prepare the "Rach 3" for a crucial competition, his already tenuous defenses are fatally eroded by the news of Katherine's death. He performs the fearsome concerto masterfully -- today's Helfgott is at the keyboard here and elsewhere -- only to plunge into catastrophic psychosis, in effect becoming his father's second broken instrument. (While the episode is stunning in cinematic terms, a good deal of Shine is unabashedly fictive; one has been unable to determine whether David was in fact so dramatically "wrecked by success".[2])
David next re-appears in an Australian hospital as the shambling wreck one glimpsed at the outset, presumably after years of prolonged illness. His real-life psychiatrist has diagnosed this as a schizo-affective disorder (3); the film keeps the precise nature of his condition and therapy obscure beyond a single, surreal shock treatment after his break, and his passing mention that doctors forbade him the piano for fear of exacerbation. The prescription sounds barbarous, but it may not have been intended to be a permanent solution -- rather thus interpreted by the patient because of his raw terror about performance.
Shine intends no fashionable anti-psychiatric polemic here, nor is any implication drawn that David's case was otherwise mishandled. Instead, the film addresses a mysterious healing that lay beyond the powers of institutional medicine. It derived from David's still passionate desire to communicate with the object world, as he became able to mobilize the considerable surviving ego strength rooted in his music. His recovery was facilitated by fortuitous encounters with the kindness of strangers, as well as the support of relatives (even including his father's eventual approval, however granted fleetingly, and harshly true to form).
David's authentic rehabilitation commences as some unchartable psychic tropism draws him to the sound of a piano in the occupational therapy center. Moved by pity and awe over his past fame, the therapist obtains permission to have him move in with her. When she's intimidated by his manicky intrusiveness, he's sent to the halfway house and gradually takes up practising on the battered instrument in his room. His neighbors complain about a thunderous barrage of Lizst; the piano is locked up; so David barges back into the restaurant of the opening sequence to dash off an astonishing performance of Flight of the Bumblebee (the piece jibes well with his mercurial temperament).
In Shine's exhilirating last movement David becomes the establishment's resident entertainer; meets, falls in love with and marries Gillian (Lynn Redgrave), an off-beat astrologer who manages to strike the precise balance between accomodating his loopy shenanigans and gently putting the lid on his id. Through her good offices he's able to return to the concert hall, and a jubilant reception that elicited this reviewer's unashamed tears.
Creativity and conflict are inextricably melded in David's fateful regeneration: the ironically self-deprecating diffidence that draws so many to his side is partly driven by his ancient struggle to win his father's ambivalent affection by performing his role as the ever good, compliant little boy (even as he makes veiled assertions about stubbornly pursuing his idiosyncratic course to the light). The mind so devastatated now awakens to experience as if it were newly minted, to be newly savored and processed with a child's fresh hope and sweet humor ("It's a mystery, a mystery, inexpressibly inexplicable" is his recurrent refrain).
David's utterly beguiling speech reflects far more method than the madness it first disclosed. As his words tumble towards integrating the vivid personal essence of whatever event is at hand, echolalic shards of Peter's dire admonitions ("flawed fatally, flawed fatally, be punished the rest of my life...") alternate with quicksilver Joycean linguistics (the Helfgott Holocaust dead were "concentrated"), and flashes of mordant insight ("I never grew up, I grew down, har har...").(4) His lovely last meditation, standing with Gillian before his father's gravestone, comprises the xenith of David's giddy poetics: in style and affirmation, it echoes the famous concluding monologue by Molly Bloom from Joyce's Ulysses:
"...you cant go on blaming yourself thats true you cant go on blaming daddy because he's not here anymore...I'm here! that's true!! life goes on is that right, that's right, it does forever and ever no never forever never forever...life is not that long it goes on and you have to keep on going too...its the stars Gillian, a mystery... we just need to seize the reason for the season..!"
Objection has been raised in some quarters over a perceived excess of sentiment over substance in Shine -- e.g., its lack of detail about the years between David's breakdown and recuperation -- ignoring the artfulness informing the film's biographical deletions and aesthetic choices. Shine has notably drawn negative comparison On the grounds of alleged slimness to Francois Girard's admirable 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (l995). One submits that it's a grievous mistake to task the former with the latter's intellectual freight. David Helfgott is undoubtedly brilliant, but no suggestion obtains -- at least in the picture --that he shares Gould's diverse intellectual pursuits away from performing. (One notes that Gould's genius seemed to escalate after he totally withdrew from concertizing and devoted himself to recording as he became ever more bizarrely reclusive. Mutatis mutandis, Helfgott's renascent genius and mental health articulated with his overwhelming need to be heard in the flesh.)
Finally, Shine has been attacked for refurbishing the Hollywood stereotype of the agonized virtuoso, as well as the myth that madness and creativity are always desparately linked. This agenda exists in the mind of the film's critics, not Hicks and his colleagues. With immense compassion, the latter have recorded the rescue from ruinous chronic illness of a single suffering soul who happened to be an artist, and whose gifts admittedly enhanced his chances for redemptive human contact. If any general inference is to be taken from Shine's account of of David Helffgott's harrowing history, it is that other sufferers, lacking his gifts or charisma, might be as well served if we would but heed, instead of turning away in fear, abhorrence, or derision.
FOOTNOTES
l. In all fairness, it should be noted that the critical academy was similarly inclined towards interpreting creativity as a product of conflict for many years, under the influence of the Freudian theories advanced by Edmund Wilson (The Wound And The Bow, New York: Oxford University Press, l94l) and subsequent pathobiographers.
2. Freud's classic formulation
(Freud, Sigmund: "Those Wrecked By Success, in "Some Character Types met
with in Psycho-Analytic Work" (l9l5), Collected Papers, Vol. 4, Ernest
Jones, Ed., NY: Basic Books, l959, pp. 321-4l) attributed a breakdown such
as Helfgott's to the patient's unconscous equation of success with the
gratification of forbidden Oedipal wishes. Under this rubric, success symbolized
a symbolic murder of the same-sexed parent to enjoy the other's favor,
fraught with intolerable anxiety and remorse.
Freud did not address
an earlier dynamic encountered in the more serious afflictions precipitated
by success, which seems pertinent to Helffgott's circumstances. From a
pre-Oedipal perspective, success may unconsciously threaten a catastrophic
rupture of the life sustaining maternal-infant symbiosis, especially to
an ego rendered vulnerable by poorly understood constitutional factors,
or by a morbid intensification of the mother's bonding with the child in
its earliest years due to her own excessive neediness. This in turn causes
the child to become excruciatingly sensitive to real or imagined threats
of her loss (the two stressors need not be mutually exclusive). Shine infers
that Peter Helfgott usurped his wife's nurturing from early on, to form
just such a pathologically intense symbiotic tie with his son. It
must be emphasized that these interpretations are only applicable to the
cinematic David and Peter Helfgott, since details of their offscreen biography
are virtually lacking. At this writing, one of David's sisters has come
forward to assert that Shine's depiction of the father's tyranny is a terrible
distortion; a brother has stated the father was dominating, but not physically
abusive.
It's also been discovered
that Helfgott had played the "Rach 3" in Australia without incident, prior
to his London schooling.
3. In schizo-affective illness, the disturbed thought processes of schizophrenia that give rise to symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions are conflated -- in varying degrees -- with the disordered mood of the depressive or manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. It is widely believed that schizo-affectives are schizophrenic at base.
4. Other observers have incorrectly
described David's speech as a "word salad", the highly fragmented, incoherent
farrago of the severely regressed schizophrenic. While his utterance does
exhibit some signatures of schizophrenia such as loosened and klang (rhyming)
associations, other locutions are more typical of bipolar illness: pressure,
perseveration, flight of ideas, so forth. Initially, David's language is
often difficult to follow or comprehend, but much of what he says about
himself and his world yields up trenchant significance on repeated listening.
In his well reasoned
overview, Dr. Kyle Pruett also speculates on the impact of "too much electroconvulsive
therapy or too many major tranquilizers for too many years" upon David's
speech and motility. ("Where Creativity Ventures, Must Madness Follow?".
New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure Section, l7 November l996, pp. l7-27.)