Movie Review: Touched with Fire
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Touched with Fire asks whether love between two thirty-something adults with bipolar disorder can be successful, loosely wondering about the intersection of sensuality, realism, and mental illness. It seems interested to extract a rubric explaining the connection between people with mental illness who are creatives. The film meanders through this exploration rather than makes up its mind as a creative drama or a serious character study where we could feel immediate pathos for the couple’s suffering and willfully involve ourselves in their situation (which could be an educational, engrossing filmic experience if well-presented). Contemporary films about mental illness such as Girl, Interrupted and A Beautiful 
Mind achieve this by stripping away characters’ “faces,” showing them as raw and realistic from the beginning. Disappointingly, this doesn’t happen in Touched with Fire. It takes time before New York City poets Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco (Luke Kirby) approach identities more recognizably meaningful, and not as clichés of mental illness bodies. This didn’t happen for me until they suffer their first manic attack and in recovery, are cared for with tremendous tenderness by their parents.
Ms. Holmes and Mr. Kirby get better – more convincing, more vulnerable, more passionate – as the story goes on, which helps. Their connection, told through states of mania, depression, and medication, produces magic when they imagine themselves entering into Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night for some kind of forever. They run through the mental hospital art room corridors towards a holographic version of van Gogh’s famous painting as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker eggs them on. Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky were bipolar and written about in the book Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison, for which the film takes its name and dedicates itself. The spiraling movements of sun, moon, and its ultimate, eclipse, are the shapes that bind the couple.
This scene is mesmerizing for its collision of reality and dreaming. The characters’ belief they can go to this special place and Carla’s fear they will lose each other there is both visceral and affecting. The Science of Sleep and Finding Neverland do wonders with this type of emotive, visual storytelling, injecting joy while narrating painful relationship makings. But, Touched with Fire confuses its uplift by telling a depressing story in a mostly depressing and alarming way. These moments of gloriously ID, eroto-social dream world imaginings are not woven in gently nor consistently enough to make us laugh and cry at the same time.
Part of where I think an early pathos gets squashed for Carla and Marco revolves around their race and socio-economic situation. Both are white and sufficiently well off to receive their parents’ support and resources not only when they relapse, but when they are medicated, in therapy, and live alone. It is worth noting the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports in the past year, less than half of the adults in the U.S. who have a mental health condition were recipients of mental health services. The Alliance also reports an estimated 26% of homeless adults who live in shelters have a serious mental illness, and that Hispanic Americans and African Americans used mental health services at approximately half the rate of Caucasian Americans in the past year. In jails, approximately 20% of state prisoners report “a recent history” of living with a mental health condition. At a time where more attention is being directed to the disproportionate number of African Americans in jail in the U.S., the care Marco is shown once arrested for graffiti and taken not to a jail but to a mental hospital demands thinking about whether everyone caught for a crime of that nature would be treated this way.
Ms. Holmes was a well-intentioned pick for Carla since she performs best when she is quirky (Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Pieces of April) and lightweight blockbuster roles do not utilize this strength (Batman Begins). She has moments of empowering Carla’s struggle, particularly once she realizes Marco is not taking his medicine, resulting in a referendum on their relationship and its future. Her dark lipstick when she is in solitary confinement and Marco’s healthy countenance after he tells his father he is surviving on ketchup are hardly believable for their circumstances. Carla’s parents (Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman) and Marco’s father (Griffin Dunne) give the film’s best performances. These parents live constantly on the edge, not knowing if their child is okay, or will ever be. Marco’s father is the real heartbreak; his wife had bipolar disorder and left both of them.
Executive produced by Spike Lee and co-produced by Ms. Holmes, there is something of the constrained tension in Mr. Lee’s 25th Hour here, with major scenes happening in living rooms or in fleeing from the big city. The set is minimalist, but director Paul Dalio gets in some beautiful shots of Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. The film’s pervasive quietness marks Touched with Fire as an indie feature, and for better or for worse, keeps our attention on its main characters. Carla and Marco find temporary belonging in the world through their love and history of their illness, and feel when they are together that flourishing is a possibility. Ultimately, they create something timeless. This fine ending seems almost too novel for these characters, but will be most understood by those who have been lit by fire and struggled to make something beautiful when it ends.
Dina Paulson-McEwen
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