I have just finished watching the film
Spider (2002) by David Cronenberg and with Ralph Fiennes in the leading role as a very mentally ill man.
This is a pretty complex film since we get to follow the story kind of through the eyes, or through the mind really, of the character Spider (Ralph Fiennes). Just as the schizofrenic man, we are not sure about what has happened in the past and what goes on right now. We are sure about when the film jumps back to the past and Spider's childhood, but all of a sudden the characters from the past start to appear in the present as well. The events that we were sure had really happened in the first half of the film all of a sudden seemed to be fabrications of Spider's ill mind. In the end of the film I realize that I can't be sure of anything that has happened in the film, because Spider isn't sure himself. Because Spider is completely mad.
I read an interview with Cronenberg when he said that Fiennes wanted to prepare himself for the role by visiting different asylums and meet schizofrenic patients. Cronenberg told him that he didn't care whether or not he did this because it wasn't a case study they were making. He preferred that Fiennes looked deep within himself instead of trying to illustrate classic schizofrenic symptoms. The film was supposed to be a portrait of a human being, not a clinical study - it's film art, not science.
This is kind of interesting since I find this film a whole lot more believable than films like
A Beautiful Mind. Ron Howard, the director of
A Beautiful Mind, made use of the illness that John Nash suffers from to gain the sympathy from the audience, and he used it as an excuse to make a sellable Hollywood story.
A Beautiful Mind is about a true person with a real illness, but it totally fails to convince me.
Spider is not about portraiting schizofrenic people as realistic as possible, but rather to tell a remarkable story which is realized only because the storyteller (because that's what Spider really is, a storyteller) is mad. And this results in a film that at least I think is a hell of a lot more convincing in its portrait of a schizofrenic man than
A Beautiful Mind. We understand what a confusing and frightening everyday life Spider is living because we are told this remarkable story. So, at the same time as we get a really interesting and original film, we learn about what it is like to be completly nuts.