Beautiful Dreamers starts
off in late nineteenth century London, Ontario, in a mental asylum.  Dr.
Maurice Bucke is the new superintendent.  He finds that they practice the usual
barbaric treatments, tying patients down and operating on them, but he
genuinely wants to improve people’s lives.  A man of both science and humanity,
he is searching for better treatments.  He travels to Philadelphia for a
conference on new treatments, but finds more of the same readiness to butcher
patients in the name of helping them.  His trip is not a total waste, however,
because he meets Walt Whitman.  Whitman has an older brother Jesse at home who
is mentally ill, but Whitman treats him with compassion and love, and Bucke is
so impressed, he invites the poet to come back to Canada with him.  Whitman’s
disregard for modern conventions does not sit well with Bucke’s wife, but his
daughter loves the man.  Under Whitman’s influence, Bucke starts making changes
at the asylum, releasing the patience from their constraints, and giving them
exercise and leisure activities.  Of course, the other doctors and staff at the
asylum are very resistant to these changes, and are worried that allowing the
patients to play with cricket bats is dangerous.  The local disapproval grows,
and Bucke’s wife starts to become more disturbed by her husband’s conversion. 
For a short while, it looks as if she may become depressed.  However, she
compares the advice she gets from the traditional doctors with the ideas of her
husband, and she embraces his free thinking ways.  The climax of the film is a
rather unbelievable showdown between the town and the asylum, in the form of a
cricket match between the town cricket team and the doctors and patients. 

This historical drama is solidly
directed by John Kent Harrison, who gets consistent performances from his cast,
which includes Rip Torn playing Walt Whitman.  It is not a particularly
sophisticated film, since most of the ideas are telegraphed and reemphasized,
so it falls into a genre of sincere movie with actors dressed up in Victorian
costumes.  It isn’t easy to tell how accurate a depiction of the asylum the
film gives, and the final cricket match is plainly ludicrous.  Nevertheless,
the film certainly conveys a strong message about the importance of treating
people with mental illnesses humanely, set in the context of the rejection of narrow-minded
tradition and unfeeling science. 

© 2006 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Movies