Three Christs

Milton Rokeach was an American social psychologist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s worked in a Michigan mental institution and devised an approach to study three different men, each who claimed to be the real Jesus Christ. His approach was to put the three men together and have sessions, eliminating their contact with other patients.

The movie is less of a biography and more of a dramatization of what all went on. Richard Gere is in the role of the doctor, and they changed his name to Dr. Stone. Truthfully the movie moves pretty slowly most times and I can understand that some viewers might become bored and abandon the viewing. My wife and I watched it at home on DVD from our public library and found it worthwhile. All the actors, most very accomplished, are uniformly good in their roles.

This is just a well-made movie of a curious chapter in human psychology.

I started out watching this film with some skepticism as psychiatric patients are so often misrepresented. As someone who worked in a state psychiatric facility for a couple of decades, I'm quite familiar with paranoid schizophrenics, and I have to say they were aptly portrayed in Three Christs. I'm not familiar with the study on which it is based but it did influence a lot of what was to come in treatment for these kinds of patients. The message that came across is one that I incorporated into my practice: treating people with respect, dignity, warmth and caring does wonders. The delusions may not go away, but they recede into the background as the patients start to feel cared for and better about life in general. That "Dr. Stone/Stein" was a warm and caring doctor is unquestionable, at least according to the film, and that in itself is a great model for any psychiatric student to emulate.

Aside from that, the film, I believe, would have a limited audience as most people are not terribly interested in the subject. Even someone like me who is interested in the subject found the film boring in select passages. Overall, the actors did a good job with the material.

I rated this so high because I work in mental health and it connects with me but to the everyday person I would say allow this film to unfold, it has very believable character performances which are easy to follow and as the film progresses you become attached to

Such talented actors, somewhat wasted in a meandering story overly loaded with clichés and melodrama. There's a compelling story somewhere underneath all the quirkiness and over-dramatic options, but it never fully surfaces. It feels too staged, even like a play, and I never fully believed that I was seeing real people other than such talented actors. The performance is still worth watching, especially that of the Three Christs, they are all brilliant in their uncharacteristic roles.

The complexity of the source material should not be portrayed in the "uplifting" manor that this film presents. It's honestly disgusting. Treating human beings like rats should be depicted with more nuance and subtlety, not bloated theatrics.