Mr. Jones
Mr. Jones (1993)
★★ / ★★★★
Richard Gere stars as Mr. Jones, a manic-depressive who one day meets Lena Olin, a psychiatrist, and the two fall for each other. I wish Eric Roth, the writer, eliminated the romance aspect of this picture because he doesn’t really introduce or say anything new about doctor-patient relationships. Instead, the focus should have been on Mr. Jones’ behavior where he one minute seems to be the happiest man on earth but the next minute he feels hopeless and suicidal. The movie shines whenever it shows other people with a mental disorder; it argues that the disorder doesn’t define the person and others who do not have the disorder should be more sensitive to people who do have the disorder. Unfortunately, the stigmatization in the workplace was nicely shown in one scene but never truly explored. The first half is definitely stronger than the second half. The latter had more scenes involving Gere and Olin being sweet to each other but never going anywhere. The film’s pacing felt stuck and gradually got worse until the last scene. In the end, I felt like it didn’t have enough material to engage the audiences so it succumbed to the whole boy-meets-girl structure, which was a really bad move because I initially thought that the characters were intelligent. I wanted to learn more about the lives of people with bipolar disorder (in this case, Bipolar I Disorder) and how they cope with their every day lives. I also wanted to know more about the subtleties of how a normal person treats an individual who he or she happens to label as “crazy.” In real life, we do label people and our beliefs and actions are not always parallel to each other. This film somehow managed to turn an interesting topic of psychology into something banal. If it wasn’t for Gere and Olin’s acting, I would stay skip this movie completely. With a little more alteration in the script (especially the second half), this could’ve been much stronger.
