DVD Review: Helen (2009)

ANATOMY OF DEPRESSION

If you've ever battled the twin demons of depression and anxiety, Sandra Nettelbeck's Helen will hold a painful, yet cathartic mirror to your face. You'll see your abject helplessness and despair in Ashley Judd's brittle, crumbling frame, in what's another case of an astonishing performance going unnoticed at big award ceremonies. If you haven't, it'll expose you to the horrors of psychological disorders and their devastating effect both on the patient, as well as those around her. Mental illness isn't quite the same thing as physical ailments and somehow, the understanding and acceptance of people in such situations (their numbers are stealthily growing) comes only through a process of rigorous sensitisation. It's not easy for the best of us to cope with it, and even more, to live with it on a daily basis.

To find a perfectly 'normal', nay fulfilling life falling to pieces, to become a stranger to those you love and to still want to retain control over your own life (which is perhaps the first and worst thing patients are forced to relinquish) isn't possible to express in words, nor enact truthfully on screen. Yet Judd achieves just that as she allows herself to disintegrate bit by bit. You can see it in the lost look and the strained smile and the taut body language that she's desperately trying to keep herself together. She's a talented woman, a successful professor of music with a happy family life that includes her second husband, David (Goran Visnjic, a very giving actor) and teenage daughter (Alexia Fast). Neither is aware of her condition, because Helen doesn't want to expose herself to anyone. The fear of being judged, of being misunderstood and above all, of losing control, is too overwhelming to bring down her defences. 

As audience, we are privy to her growing sense of despair from the very first scene when her family throws an elaborate party for her birthday and thoughtfully gifts her a piano. Helen walks outside of this scene, quietly, in the garden, like she's moved away from them without realising it herself. Later, in the middle of the night, she cleans up all the dishes and obsesses over a particular piano note which she can't get right. She's sleepless, has lost focus at work, and is struggling merely to get through the day. And one day, expectedly, she collapses after her nerves, strained for so long, finally snap, and lands up in hospital.  

"My wife is a very happy, successful woman," David helplessly argues. To which the doctor makes the most telling statement of the film -- "Your wife isn't unhappy, Mr. Leonard. She's ill." And that's the whole point. That clinical depression isn't a product of sadness, or misery over an unfortunate event in a person's life. It's a mental ailment that can afflict the most unlikely person and its cause often cannot be rationalised. In hospital, Helen fights to retain her right to make decisions about her life. And the film opens up this debate very beautifully too, as the doctor explains to David that there are laws (at least in the West) to protect such patients from being bulldozed by their families or doctors. In fact, even when Helen displays suicidal tendencies and refuses electric shock treatment, neither the doctor, nor her husband can do anything to prevent her from walking out of the hospital, after her lawyer successfully argues before the judge that Helen isn't likely to take her own life. 

And yet she may. But that's not the point. As she starts getting distanced from her family -- no matter how much they love her, they cannot understand what she's going through and hence their reactions always fall short of comforting her. In fact, their desperate bid to bring her back to her old self, only makes her more aware of her condition and she stops relating to them and seeks refuge with another patient and a student of hers, Mathilda (Lauren Lee Smith in a superb, controlled performance). Because Mathilda doesn't ask Helen questions to help understand what she's going through. She knows. And she also knows how fragile the semblance of normalcy is. Yet, the two women bond and gain strength and solace with each other. 

Helen is deliberately slow-paced and the visual design is blue, moody and unsettling, set up against a bleak Vancouver landscape. It is an educative film, but doesn't seem preachy. And it most certainly is heartfelt. Nettelbeck lost a dear friend to suicide and this seems to be her way of making sense of the tragedy.