Birthpsychology at the Movies

The Cell (2002, New Line Productions, 107 minutes)
Reviewed by Michael Trout

The Cell is a pretty gruesome film, overall, and one is not at all certain how gratuitous some of the gore is. And the plot is more than a little weak: technology has been invented that will allow well-known social worker Jennifer Lopez to creep into the minds of others, to shorten the social-history-taking a bit by just seeing for herself what they have been through. She does all this in a high-tech lab to which particularly difficult patients are sent for "treatment." Were this all there were to the film, it could not possibly be recommended to anyone except heavy violence junkies.

Enter an especially awful psychopathic killer with an m.o. so predictable that, when he is caught, the good guys know just what is happening to his latest victim. She is not yet dead but, like all her predecessors, has been stashed away in some hidden location to slowly drown in a room-size tank that is, as we speak, filling up with water. The police try to get him to spill the beans about her location, whereupon he conveniently goes into what everyone mysteriously agrees is a "psychotic coma." His victim will surely die unless he comes out of it quickly and tells everyone where she is, or some wondrous method could be found for getting inside that comotose skull of his for a little peek around. Voila! J.Lo to the rescue.

And it is here that the film becomes more than a little interesting. How many of us have wished, indeed, for a shortcut to the reluctantly-revealed prenatal, perinatal, and early childhood memories of our patients? In the film, the tour is horrific, of course. The killer was, as a child, brutally humiliated and abused by his father, for years. Lopez-the-intervenor can hardly stand being in there for long. She emerges from the early sessions gasping with the terror and sadness of what she has just seen! But she never emerges with the present-day information the police need: the location of his latest victim who, as we dawdle with this latter-day therapy, may be doing her own gasping.

In a Lone Ranger-style attempt to circumvent the process and save the day, J.Lo locks herself in the lab with her patient, and reverses the process. She invites the comatose killer into her brain. She hopes there to relax him enough that he will tell her all about it. It works. He waltzes in and, in the most poignant scene in this bizarre film, appears as a frightened child, to be comforted (it's all mental, so they can make the scenes as dream-like as they wish!) by the gorgeous, gentle-spirited foster mother/social worker/Hispanic actress.

He begs her to keep him forever She cannot. Then he begs her to kill him, much as he recalls killing the injured bird he was nurturing back to health as a little boy, only to have it dawn on him that his father would surely destroy it as soon as he discovered the boy's too-sensitive project.
"It was better for him," says the child. But when he sees that she cannot save him by either keeping him or killing him, all hope is lost. Slowly he turns back into the adult killer, in front of her eyes, as he feels the despair of his past overtake him. Jennifer can do nothing. He is gone, and a symbolic figure of the boy's father rises up from a pool of water to envelope the spirit of the child-man one final time.

As an exercise in understanding what it must feel like, from the inside of the child's heart, to be repeatedly harmed by forces so menacing, so without empathy, that they cannot possibly be withstood--much less controlled--this film is worthwhile. The scene described above is an amazing representation of the hope that must lie in many foster or adoptive parents of horribly traumatized little ones: that they can love an unlovable child, with wounds so large no one else could manage him. The child will "tell" what happened, and will soften into the arms of the new caregiver, both of them becoming changed forever. I suppose this scene's finale represents accurately how the dream sometimes turns out: the the past is just too horrid, too big, has too much power, and it overtakes the child just at the moment he becomes touchable.
 
For its metaphors about child abuse, for its seductive peek at what it would be like to just know what went on back there, for its realistic portrayal of the damage a damaged mind wants to do to others, this film has value.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.