Exoticalot
People are voting emotionally.
Orla Zuniga
It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review
Brennan Camacho
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
Anthony Mora
Mental illness is a sensitive topic, no matter what the disorder. When a film is made that try to portray the sufferings of one of these poor people, it better be made right, and by that I mean, put us in the sufferer's shoes. This movie did that hauntingly well.Peter Winter is a deeply disturbed man, he has just been released from a institution of some sort and is on the immediate search for his young daughter. At the same time, a police detective is trying to find a child killer, which Peter has become a prime suspect, but lacks any real evidence. That's the plot of the film, however, the plot oddly takes a back seat compared to just how the film shows what Peter goes through with his schizophrenia.Peter Greene, blows me away in this movie, before he was "the bad guy in The Mask" or "the creepy cop who goes to town on Ving Rhames, in Pulp Fiction." The man can act, every scene with Peter feels genuine, from hearing rambunctious noises and voices from no where, to random macabre events he sees. The rest of the cast wasn't bad, however there wasn't much in the way of character development with anyone else other than the daughter. The character of the police detective didn't have much going for him either in my opinion. I'm not saying the actor who played him was bad, I just would've liked to see that character used in way that would've raised the crime side of the story a bit more. The drama in this movie is powerful, as twisted as the movie is and as stomach turning of a person Peter Greene comes off as, you can't help but root for the guy, and that makes the ending of the movie all the more tragic.Let's talk about the film's depiction of schizophrenia, which was what made the movie for me. The sound design in this movie and the cinematography helped the effectiveness and punch of Peter's troubling illness. The scene where he tries to remove the "transmitter" from his fingernail, the shaving scenes in the bathroom, pretty much every scene in this movie was done really well. The look of the movie has this dirty, believable feel that compliment the story perfectly. This was a disturbing but satisfactory viewing experience. I think Peter Greene did an Oscar worthy job with his performance, it's very easy to say someone wasn't believable in a role like this, but Mr. Greene will have you sold from the starting minute and on. The story may not be an all out spectacle and there were many characters that could have been utilized a bit better, but the journey you take with the character of Peter Winter is the real reason you watch this movie.
velvethighpeace
One of the most impressive film debuts of American cinema in the last twenty years, 'Clean, Shaven' (1993) recalls the mastery of filmmakers like Robert Bresson and Terrence Malick. It is a bleak and painful journey into the realm of mental illness, but also a bold, humanist and poetic piece of cinema. Special mention should be made to the use of sound, here more than ever an essential element in the film and one which stands out to the point of being a fine work of art in itself. Lodge Kerrigan's next films -'Claire Dolan' (1998) and 'Keane' (2004)- have delivered all his debut promised and have placed the director among the most important auteurs in American cinema.
Heislegend
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this movie. I'll confess one this right away: I am not particularly a fan of art-house type films. They often don't have much of a point to them and you're left trying to figure out pretty much everything that's going on and what it all means. In a way it's liberating because it allows you to draw your own conclusions and not be bound by a cut and dry story. In another way it's somewhat annoying because it lacks almost anything resembling structure.The film itself sort of slogs along at it's own steady pace full of jarring moments and a soundtrack designed to put you that much more into the mind of a schizophrenic. That effect works very well...I imagine the mind of a schizophrenic is equally disjointed and maddening. If you can picture a film full of what sounds like a radio stuck between stations and random voices and you'll start to get the idea. I will say that I'm not entirely sure why everyone thinks Peter Greene's performance is so ground breaking. Sure, he was good in the film, but what does it really take to play a schizophrenic? Act twitchy and look confused a lot. I'm sure it's not quite THAT simple but Greene's performance, though good, wasn't anything that blew me away. To be honest nobody in the film absolutely floored me, but it is a very interesting glimpse into the life of a very troubled and disturbed man.I consider myself a fairly average movie fan. I like movies that allow you to turn your brain off as much as I like movies that have a subtext to them and make you think. But I'll be the first to admit that if there is a real point to this film, I'm the wrong guy to ask as to what it is. It's almost like a real life case study of one man who has serious problems. In a weird way it's nice to see such a realistic portrayal of such a mental illness instead of seeing it dressed up and romanticized like in...say...A Beautiful Mind. All in all I'd recommend it but you have to be in the right mood (or at least I do). I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it, but it's nothing if not interesting, especially as a debut film.
thecineman
Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is a tormented schizophrenic man who is let out of a hospital despite suffering from extreme symptoms of nearly continuous auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and a highly fragmented, discontinuous sense of reality. His one steady goal is to find his young daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who has begun a new life as an adoptee, following the murder of her mother. Peter first visits his own mother, a taciturn, emotionally withholding woman who is not at all pleased to see him. Later he discovers his daughter's whereabouts, when her adoptive mother brings Nicole to visit her grandmother (who is as chilly toward Nicole as she is toward Peter). Meanwhile, a police detective (Robert Albert), searching for a serial child killer, has concluded that Peter is his man. A fateful ending is set up when the detective encounters Peter with Nicole at an isolated beach. There are serious flaws in this film: the screenplay is not well wrought and is too full of ambiguities, especially the entire serial child killing subplot. This is highly distracting. The acting is second rate, except for Greene's and MacDonald's performances. The film's strength lies in Kerrigan's insightful deployment of sound, setting and other effects to create the clinical realism of Peter's schizophrenic experience. Peter's intense, perpetual fear is palpable. Much of the film is shot in his car, where he has placed masking tape over the mirror, and newspaper over several windows, to fortify his privacy. The effect is an impacted atmosphere of paranoid insulation. Peter's hallucinated auditory experience – garbled voices, static and other noise, unaccompanied by any visual representations – is clinically valid. The voices and noise haunt him steadily. He tells Nicole he has had a radio device implanted in his head, with a transmitter in a fingernail. Earlier we had been exposed to his violent efforts to rid himself of these devices using scissors or a knife to gouge them out – forms of delusion-driven self-mutilation that are uncommon but not rare in persons suffering the throes of severe acute psychotic episodes. The use of tight close up camera angles - viewing Peter from just behind his back or in profile in his car - heighten the sense of claustrophobia, the extreme narrowing of Peter's psychotic world. The setting - Miscou Island, in New Brunswick – adds further accents of wildness and isolation to the overall tone of the film. It can be argued that the detective's pursuit of Peter adds yet another source of paranoid fever to the film, though for me this conceit does not ring true. The fact that someone really is after Peter detracts from the power of his delusions. Other than this, Kerrigan can be congratulated for steering clear of the false visuals (realistically visualized imaginary friends and enemies) and other clinically implausible effects that Ron Howard used more recently in A Beautiful Mind. Anyone – professional or lay viewer – might rightly wonder how Peter could be discharged from the hospital in such poor psychiatric condition. Of course that happens every day in most contemporary short stay hospital settings, because involuntary treatment laws in most states prohibit keeping patients against their will except in the most extreme circumstances of immediate potential for violence. But we are given the impression at the start of this film that Peter had been incarcerated in a more traditional mental hospital, the sort in which people stay for long periods before discharge, until they appear relatively free of symptoms, sometimes longer. Of course these large old facilities are typically short staffed, keen clinical observation of patients may be scarce, and patients not uncommonly can muster a façade of normality to win their freedom.The depiction of Peter's mother is also troublesome. Her grim withholding of affection for Peter and Nicole resurrects the spectra of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a psycho dynamic fiction popular the 1950s and 60s that accused parents, especially mothers, of causing schizophrenia through self serving, unaffectionate regard for their children. This myth was laid to rest long ago, and it is a black mark against this film to see such a notion resurrected. It does not dispel the power of this negative maternal portrayal when, from a distance, we see the mother crying as she hangs one of her son's shirts on a clothesline near the end.Clean, Shaven shares with David Cronenberg's film, Spider, the distinction of offering the most believable portraits of highly symptomatic schizophrenic experience that have been brought to the big screen. I prefer Spider because the acting is uniformly first rate and the screenplay is superior. Both films pull the viewer into an exquisitely painful, odd, lonely, and ultimately unrewarding world, into experiences that many moviegoers would, no doubt, prefer to avoid. Dramatically, this is a "C" movie, but the portrayal of schizophrenia rates an "A."