☆☆☆☆
Here is a story filled with dark and tragic family secrets, a story that begins in happiness and ends in tragedy, a story about the terrible and twisted things human beings do to each other, and the most remarkable thing about this story is: it's all true.
The happy part begins in 1980, when Bobby Shafran walks onto a college campus to the strangest welcome anyone's ever known. Everyone he sees is a stranger, but they all act like they know him. It doesn't take long before the mystery is solved -- and an even bigger mystery begins. Bobby, now in his late 50s, recounts how another student looked at him, asked if he was adopted, and put him on the phone with Eddy Galland, who turned out to be his long-lost identical twin brother.
Their wild story made the newspaper, and when David Kellman read it, there was another revelation: the twins were triplets, and had been separated at birth. Jane Pauley and Phil Donahue and everyone who was anyone wanted to talk with them. The triplets became celebrities. As soon as they saw each other, they loved each other. They compared notes about their lives, and discovered there were remarkable similarities.
They were as overjoyed as 19-year-old boys could be. Their parents -- an affluent professional couple, a middle-class couple, and a working-class couple, each of whom also had an adopted daughter -- were happy, too. But they were suspicious. They paid a visit to the adoption agency that had given them the boys. The people there, who specialized in placing Jewish babies, seemed less than eager to reveal too much.
Then things got really weird. That's also where Three Identical Strangers moves from being a standard talking-head documentary to being an exciting, confounding, sometimes downright shocking blend of quasi-sensational re-enactments and puzzling, unexpected revelation.
As Bobby says to begin, it's a story you'd never believe if it were recounted to you by someone you knew. British filmmaker Tim Wardle could never have even proposed the concept as a piece of fiction; it would be entirely too outlandish, except that it's true. And what it reveals about humanity is many-layered, disturbing and sometimes even unexpectedly profound.
Three Identical Strangers is at once a comedy, a thriller, a horror movie and a stirring drama, which is quite a feat for what on the surface appears to be a straightforward documentary. Other than some simply produced (and at one point rather pointedly melodramatic) dramatic re-enactments, it's a blend of talking heads and period home movies, helped immeasurably by the film's setting in early 1980s Long Island, just as Americans were growing more and more obsessed with documenting their lives.
Impressively, the film barely hints at its deeper secrets, and even if you go into it as I did with a little foreknowledge that something grim is at its core, it's easy to be swept away by the pure joy of the first third of the story -- as Bobby, Eddy and David discover each other, and take advantage of becoming momentary celebrities, Three Identical Strangers would be satisfying as a recollection of a minor footnote in pop-culture history.
Then comes the first bombshell, as the boys and their parents learn that so many of the things that seem impossible in their story might not be as impossible as they imagined. Yet, even knowing what they know, the boys plow forward with their notoriety, at one point opening a restaurant called Triplets that becomes a minor Greenwich Village hotspot.
And even while the filmmakers are still exploring all of the unbelievable implications of the first shocking revelation, here's the second big plot twist, another one that would be almost eye-rolling in its drama if Three Identical Strangers were fiction. But it's not.
What happens in the final third of the story brings deeper nuance to everything that has come before, and opens up a broader line of questioning for director Wardle and his associates. The question of nature versus nurture has been an inherent part of the story from the start -- did Eddy, Bobby and David grow up with differences and similarities despite or because of their varied upbringings, and what does that say about the way anyone's environment affects his or her development? That's the question every TV talk-show host wanted to know from the moment the news broke of the triplets' strange story.
But Wardle waits until just the right moment to bring in this second shocker, which along with a late-in-the-story introduction of some new characters (anyone who has read Agatha Christie knows the importance of that kind of a trick in a mystery), leaves the audience reeling. There aren't many documentaries that can elicit a communal gasp from the audience the way this one did when I saw it: The revelations are that extraordinary.
Three Identical Strangers has a little bit of a harder time knowing how to wrap it all up (also not uncommon to twisty mysteries), and if its denouement feels a little uncertain, maybe it's because nearly 30 years after the events of its story, there's still no satisfying conclusion -- too much about its story remains unresolved in ways that are themselves more than a little mysterious and troubling.
At a brisk 96 minutes, it would have been easy for Wardle to succumb to the temptation of turning this into a 10-hour miniseries for digital television or a multi-episode podcast, but he keeps the story compact, taut and mesmerizing. It's a rare documentary that can rival Hollywood entertainment, but Three Identical Strangers does exactly that.
Viewed July 8, 2018 -- Laemmle Town Center 5
1330
The happy part begins in 1980, when Bobby Shafran walks onto a college campus to the strangest welcome anyone's ever known. Everyone he sees is a stranger, but they all act like they know him. It doesn't take long before the mystery is solved -- and an even bigger mystery begins. Bobby, now in his late 50s, recounts how another student looked at him, asked if he was adopted, and put him on the phone with Eddy Galland, who turned out to be his long-lost identical twin brother.
Their wild story made the newspaper, and when David Kellman read it, there was another revelation: the twins were triplets, and had been separated at birth. Jane Pauley and Phil Donahue and everyone who was anyone wanted to talk with them. The triplets became celebrities. As soon as they saw each other, they loved each other. They compared notes about their lives, and discovered there were remarkable similarities.
They were as overjoyed as 19-year-old boys could be. Their parents -- an affluent professional couple, a middle-class couple, and a working-class couple, each of whom also had an adopted daughter -- were happy, too. But they were suspicious. They paid a visit to the adoption agency that had given them the boys. The people there, who specialized in placing Jewish babies, seemed less than eager to reveal too much.
Then things got really weird. That's also where Three Identical Strangers moves from being a standard talking-head documentary to being an exciting, confounding, sometimes downright shocking blend of quasi-sensational re-enactments and puzzling, unexpected revelation.
As Bobby says to begin, it's a story you'd never believe if it were recounted to you by someone you knew. British filmmaker Tim Wardle could never have even proposed the concept as a piece of fiction; it would be entirely too outlandish, except that it's true. And what it reveals about humanity is many-layered, disturbing and sometimes even unexpectedly profound.
Three Identical Strangers is at once a comedy, a thriller, a horror movie and a stirring drama, which is quite a feat for what on the surface appears to be a straightforward documentary. Other than some simply produced (and at one point rather pointedly melodramatic) dramatic re-enactments, it's a blend of talking heads and period home movies, helped immeasurably by the film's setting in early 1980s Long Island, just as Americans were growing more and more obsessed with documenting their lives.
Impressively, the film barely hints at its deeper secrets, and even if you go into it as I did with a little foreknowledge that something grim is at its core, it's easy to be swept away by the pure joy of the first third of the story -- as Bobby, Eddy and David discover each other, and take advantage of becoming momentary celebrities, Three Identical Strangers would be satisfying as a recollection of a minor footnote in pop-culture history.
Then comes the first bombshell, as the boys and their parents learn that so many of the things that seem impossible in their story might not be as impossible as they imagined. Yet, even knowing what they know, the boys plow forward with their notoriety, at one point opening a restaurant called Triplets that becomes a minor Greenwich Village hotspot.
And even while the filmmakers are still exploring all of the unbelievable implications of the first shocking revelation, here's the second big plot twist, another one that would be almost eye-rolling in its drama if Three Identical Strangers were fiction. But it's not.
What happens in the final third of the story brings deeper nuance to everything that has come before, and opens up a broader line of questioning for director Wardle and his associates. The question of nature versus nurture has been an inherent part of the story from the start -- did Eddy, Bobby and David grow up with differences and similarities despite or because of their varied upbringings, and what does that say about the way anyone's environment affects his or her development? That's the question every TV talk-show host wanted to know from the moment the news broke of the triplets' strange story.
But Wardle waits until just the right moment to bring in this second shocker, which along with a late-in-the-story introduction of some new characters (anyone who has read Agatha Christie knows the importance of that kind of a trick in a mystery), leaves the audience reeling. There aren't many documentaries that can elicit a communal gasp from the audience the way this one did when I saw it: The revelations are that extraordinary.
Three Identical Strangers has a little bit of a harder time knowing how to wrap it all up (also not uncommon to twisty mysteries), and if its denouement feels a little uncertain, maybe it's because nearly 30 years after the events of its story, there's still no satisfying conclusion -- too much about its story remains unresolved in ways that are themselves more than a little mysterious and troubling.
At a brisk 96 minutes, it would have been easy for Wardle to succumb to the temptation of turning this into a 10-hour miniseries for digital television or a multi-episode podcast, but he keeps the story compact, taut and mesmerizing. It's a rare documentary that can rival Hollywood entertainment, but Three Identical Strangers does exactly that.
Viewed July 8, 2018 -- Laemmle Town Center 5
1330
No comments:
Post a Comment