MOVIE REVIEWS : Wiseman’s Indelible ‘Follies’

Twenty-five years after it was shot, 24 years after a Massachusetts judge banned it, Frederick Wiseman’s great documentary, “The Titicut Follies” (at Laemmle’s Grande, Downtown L.A.) has lost none of its power, its clarity and outrage, and none of its mysterious and overwhelming compassion.

It remains a searing record of inhumanity, an immaculately judged cry of rage at society’s mistreatment of its “deviants.”

For barely an hour and a half, in grainy dramatic monochrome images, we wander through the corridors and cells of Bridgewater, a mental facility, which back in 1966 imprudently mixed regular patients and disturbed convicts and, perhaps more imprudently, allowed ex-lawyer Wiseman to record on film what happened there.

We watch as the “patients” are stripped, fed, shaved, bullied and locked in their cells. We watch them wander in the yards, debate politics--the Vietnam War is a persistent topic--hear spectacular displays of chaotic vitriol. We hear one young man plead to be returned to prison, claiming the environment and regimen of drugs are “harming” him. “Well, that’s interesting logic,” one doctor wryly observes, and prescribes more drugs.

That’s the deepest horror of the film: Its victims have been reduced to a state where their debasement is taken for granted.

Wiseman’s later documentaries (“Welfare,” High School”) helped make him a legend in that area. But, though he was a tyro director when he shot and edited “Titicut,” his method was fully formed: the cinema verite camera, the stark and startling close-ups, the volatile mix of unvarnished reality and reality-as-metaphor.

Class dictates the boundaries of Wiseman’s world, as it does in most of his documentaries. The inmates are obviously too poor or ordinary to resist society’s incursions into their lives--whether because they are genuinely criminal, or simply “odd.”

They are among the many people who in the ‘80s were perhaps popularly seen as not worth thinking or caring about by a success-obsessed society. Yet this film proves the opposite. A cool-eyed testament full of pity and fury, “Titicut Follies” (Times-rated Mature for nudity) has images and faces as indelible as any in film, episodes that leave you chilled to the bone. That’s the core of Wiseman’s art: He catches the horror past nightmare, the pain all around us, that we mostly miss.

‘The Titicut Follies’

A Zipporah Films release. Producer/director/editor Frederick Wiseman. Cinematographer John Marshall. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes

Times-rated Mature (nudity).