Made for television in 1995 and featuring Raul Julia's final screen appearance as well as fine performances from Laura Dern and Vanessa Redgrave, Down Came a Blackbird is one of those unexpected finds that serendipitously pop up on late night movie channel programming.
As a mystery, the film is far too static and talky, and its main plot line - mysterious foreign agents pursuing `Professor Ramirez' (the Julia character) - turns out to be a very weak Maguffin. Nevertheless, I found myself unable to turn off the television, even as time marched into the wee hours of the morning. The development and interplay of the three main characters was riveting and the framing device of a Betty Ford-like clinic for post-torture victims provided a curious and fascinating variation on the group therapy psychodrama genre. Of course the very existence of such a clinic makes a profound comment on the pervasiveness of state-sponsored torture in the modern era. To further emphasize the point, the victims in Down Came a Blackbird are drawn from diverse historical and geographic sources: Central America, Haiti, the '60's Greek Junta, and an unnamed African revolution. The clinic's director, Anna Lenke (Vanessa Redgrave), is herself a survivor of unspeakable horrors experienced in Nazi concentration camps.
Since this is a film driven by character and dialogue, the casting and acting were the most critical elements to its success. Julia's unfortunate real-life bout with cancer (he died six days after the shoot) certainly adds to the credibility of his role as a man haunted by what the other patients and the audience believe are memories of psychological terror designed to silence his outspoken intelligentsia criticism of state terror. That the source of his torment turns out to be something unexpectedly other only adds to the impact of the performance. Likewise, Laura Dern is utterly convincing in her role as a journalist/political torture victim, in part because she too looks severely emaciated - although one hopes that real life was not also the cause of her anorexic appearance.
At any rate, her character, Helen McNulty, suffers the film's central violation of innocence as symbolized by the title's allusion to the last verse of `Sing a Song of Sixpence': `The Maid was in the garden/Hanging out the clothes./When down came a blackbird/And snapped off her nose.' As an ambitious but naïve journalist, Helen McNulty had gone off to cover a Central American conflict for a U.S. magazine. With startling suddenness she first witnesses the ruthless suppression of a peaceful democratic demonstration and then she and her husband/photographer are arrested and unimaginably brutalized by secret police. The details of her harrowing experience are revealed bit by bit through a series of gripping, if somewhat predictable, psychological flashbacks. Anne Lenke's relentless therapeutic probing ultimately produces the desired abreaction and McNulty's state of denial is broken down. Presumably, the American audience's naivete about state-sponsored brutality is also supposed to be disabused in the process; however, the film's resolution is too abrupt and forced for this theme to resonate as well as it might have.
Despite this third act weakness, however, Down Came a Blackbird is a sleeper worth surrendering a little sleep to tune in on.
As a mystery, the film is far too static and talky, and its main plot line - mysterious foreign agents pursuing `Professor Ramirez' (the Julia character) - turns out to be a very weak Maguffin. Nevertheless, I found myself unable to turn off the television, even as time marched into the wee hours of the morning. The development and interplay of the three main characters was riveting and the framing device of a Betty Ford-like clinic for post-torture victims provided a curious and fascinating variation on the group therapy psychodrama genre. Of course the very existence of such a clinic makes a profound comment on the pervasiveness of state-sponsored torture in the modern era. To further emphasize the point, the victims in Down Came a Blackbird are drawn from diverse historical and geographic sources: Central America, Haiti, the '60's Greek Junta, and an unnamed African revolution. The clinic's director, Anna Lenke (Vanessa Redgrave), is herself a survivor of unspeakable horrors experienced in Nazi concentration camps.
Since this is a film driven by character and dialogue, the casting and acting were the most critical elements to its success. Julia's unfortunate real-life bout with cancer (he died six days after the shoot) certainly adds to the credibility of his role as a man haunted by what the other patients and the audience believe are memories of psychological terror designed to silence his outspoken intelligentsia criticism of state terror. That the source of his torment turns out to be something unexpectedly other only adds to the impact of the performance. Likewise, Laura Dern is utterly convincing in her role as a journalist/political torture victim, in part because she too looks severely emaciated - although one hopes that real life was not also the cause of her anorexic appearance.
At any rate, her character, Helen McNulty, suffers the film's central violation of innocence as symbolized by the title's allusion to the last verse of `Sing a Song of Sixpence': `The Maid was in the garden/Hanging out the clothes./When down came a blackbird/And snapped off her nose.' As an ambitious but naïve journalist, Helen McNulty had gone off to cover a Central American conflict for a U.S. magazine. With startling suddenness she first witnesses the ruthless suppression of a peaceful democratic demonstration and then she and her husband/photographer are arrested and unimaginably brutalized by secret police. The details of her harrowing experience are revealed bit by bit through a series of gripping, if somewhat predictable, psychological flashbacks. Anne Lenke's relentless therapeutic probing ultimately produces the desired abreaction and McNulty's state of denial is broken down. Presumably, the American audience's naivete about state-sponsored brutality is also supposed to be disabused in the process; however, the film's resolution is too abrupt and forced for this theme to resonate as well as it might have.
Despite this third act weakness, however, Down Came a Blackbird is a sleeper worth surrendering a little sleep to tune in on.
