Three Identical Strangers

Movies to See Right Now

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LEAVE NO TRACE

Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.

OUT NOW

  • First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
  • Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
  • American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
  • RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ON VIDEO

My video pick was the best foreign film at the 2017 Cinequest, the Czech and Slovak drama The Teacher. It’s a visceral peek inside the everyday dread inherent in society behind the Iron Curtain. The Teacher can now be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

ON TV

Andy Griffith in A FACE IN THE CROWD

On July 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing A Face in the Crowd. During every year of the 1960s, Andy Griffith entered the living rooms of most Baby Boomers as Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and in guest appearances on Mayberry R.F.D. Younger folks knew him from another ten seasons on television starring as Matlock.

But, in his very first feature film, Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. He quickly rises in the infotainment universe until he is an A List celeb and a political power broker. To Jeffries’ horror, Rhodes reveals himself to be an evil, power-hungry megalomaniac. Jeffries made him – can she break him? The seduction of a gullible public by a good timin’ charmer predicts the careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, although Lonesome Rhodes is meaner than Reagan and less ideological than Bush.  The seduction of a gullible public by a corrupt demagogue also predicts Donald Trump although Lonesome Rhodes is far less narcissistic and fascistic than Trump.

Amazingly, A Face in the Crowd did not garner even a nomination for an Academy Award for Griffith – or for any of its other filmmakers. Today, it is well-regarded, having been added to the library of Congress’ preservation list in the US National Film Registry and rating 91% in the critical reviews tallied by Rotten Tomatoes. It is one of the greatest political films.

Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal in A FACE IN THE CROWD

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS: a Feel Good until we peel back the onion

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THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

The startling documentary Three Identical Strangers begins with a young man’s first day on a college campus, being greeted by strangers who are convinced that they know him; that night, a fellow student connects him to his double, born on the same day. They turned out to be identical siblings separated at birth and adopted by different families.  Even more stunning, the two brothers soon find their identical triplet.

The first third of Three Identical Strangers is a wonderful Feel Good story of family discovery.  But then we find that the triplets’ separation had been orchestrated as part of a  longitudinal study of nurture vs. nature.  Researchers INTENTIONALLY separated identical twins and placed them with families that the researchers kept in the dark. The placements occurred AFTER the twin babies had bonded together in the crib for many months.

This study was not detached observation, it was human experimentation.  As details reminiscent of Josef Mengele unfold,  the fact that both the researcher and the adoption agency were Jewish becomes even more chilling.

A film that covers much of the same factual territory, Twinning Reaction, premiered two years ago at Cinequest.  Twinning Reaction focuses on the study; we meet several sets of twins, and the triplets are the jaw-dropping final act.   Three Identical Strangers focuses on the triplets and then takes a more current dive into the study.  Twinning Reaction is not yet available to stream, but it will be playing at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this July and August.

Three Identical Strangers won the Special Jury Prize for Storytelling at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  It also played at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).  Well-spun, this is an amazing story.