Touched With Fire

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Paul Dalio/Starring: Katie Holmes, Luke Kirby, Christine Lahti, Griffin Dunne and Bruce Altman

Two bipolar patients meet in a hospital and their burgeoning relationship proves to be passionate and artistically inspired but also mutually pernicious. Their struggle to be together becomes an issue not only for their doctor but their respective families, who fear their manic tendencies pose a danger to one another. One patient; Carla (Katie Holmes, who does well with the material), is a published poet who is prone to furious, in-the-middle-of-the-night surges of creativity while the other; Marco (Luke Kirby), is a visual artist and also a poet with his own volcanic emotions.

When we first see Marco, he is pirating electricity in his apartment building after the power is shut off. He explains to his father that he has gone off the grid and no longer needs modern conveniences to survive. It is amusing to hear Marco tell this father that he is able to live on ketchup from McDonald's and free milk from Starbuck's. His apartment is a disheveled wreck of wall to wall books and miscellanies. From the phone conversation with his father, we gather Marco has not only stopped taking his medication but refuses to be on them again.

An incident where Marco sneaks onto the roof of a building to stare at the moon lands him in the hospital mental ward while Carla's highly erratic and manic behavior behavior becomes manifest during a 1AM visit to her mother Sara (an excellent Christine Lahti). Though we expect Carla's behavior to exasperate her mother, her odd visitation doesn't elicit anger or reproach but maternal patience that is quite touching. Concerned with her own condition, Carla admits herself into the hospital and becomes furious the next morning when her doctor refuses to discharge her.

Held against their will, Carla and Marco become part of the hospital's bipolar support/therapy group. During a therapy session, Marco's comments on the apocalypse earn him a rebuke from the therapist and a sharp reprimand from Carla, who grows impatient with his loud, negative chatter. But the two begin to bond during an extemporaneous game whereby the participants recite their own poem with only a word to inspire them. Carla's is immediately taken by Marco's poetic talents. The creative fire the two share leads to late night/early morning meetings in the kitchen, where their respective manic energies become almost overpowering. Their boisterous, late night meetings draw the attention of the staff and their doctor, who try to bring their rendezvous to a halt.

But the doctor's efforts to keep the two apart prove unsuccessful, and their subsequent romance burgeons in spite of his and their parent's interventions.

How the relationship plays out and how the two contend with their illness and their respective families becomes the narrative infrastructure for director Paul Dalio's engaging and well-acted Touched With Fire. If you've read my blog in the past, you may remember my reservations about movies about alcoholics and mentally ill characters, specifically manic-depressives. Watching movies about unstable people can often become monotonous; over-the-top behavior sometimes leads to over-the-top drama. But some films manage to be touching and though I didn't find Dalio's film to be powerful, he at least made his characters real and treats the illness honestly without infecting the story with cheesy romanticism.

The film goes to interstellar lengths--sometimes annoyingly--to link manic-depression to creative genius, which is the story's overarching theme or idea. Van Gogh is held up as the shining example, though other great artists are mentioned; a lengthy list accompanies the closing titles. Marco himself is always ready to share a factoid about bipolar geniuses. We learn from Marco that Van Gogh painted Starry Night after seeing the night sky from his sanitarium window.
Marco and Carla's ability to feel deeply about the world is treated as a virtue but also something dangerous that threatens to keep them from connecting to the non-bipolar world. We see scenes of the two frolicking about the city, splashing in fountains, writing poetry and falling in love but Dalio also shows us the wrenching realities of their illness.

The film does well at showing how their illness affects their parents, who must contend with Marco and Carla's emotional extremes and flights of aberrant behavior. Griffin Dunne as Marco's father George and Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman as Carla's parents Sara and Donald do terrific work here. Some of the film's best scenes are the family gatherings, where the parents almost seem to be pitted against Marco and Carla.

The film isn't without its dark moments. In one such scene, Marco gathers the family for what seems to be an occasion to celebrate Carla's pregnancy before the moment morphs into something tragic. The film's ending is unexpected and unsurprising but hardly neat and comforting.

The film is chock full of light and fire motifs, which serve as visual metaphors for Carla and Marco's creative powers. Their respective energies that they feed off burn brightly like the sun and moon names they adopt but the same fires also burn, which the two discover to their peril.

I can't say every scene works; the film has its lapses but overall it was much better than expected. Kirby and Holmes pull off key performances and manage to make their characters worthy of our empathy. The film often feels like a play, which is good and bad. I was surprised to find it wasn't based on a stage production.

I walked away from the film fairly pleased but my feelings about it unfortunately don't burn the way Van Gogh's painting does for Marco. I thought it was done well but I can't extend my praise beyond that. My feelings for it are more sober, like those of someone on their meds.