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A Hole In One

2005, Movie, NR, 97 mins

A Hole In One: Review

HOLE IN ONE, A
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Writer-director Richard Ledes' dreadfully misconceived, pitch-black, film-noir comedy seeks to find the humor in the post-WWII mental hygiene boom, and the result is way off target. It's National Mental Health Week, 1953, and Dr. Harold Ashton (Bill Raymond) has come to Ice Town — an American township somewhere in the general vicinity of BLUE VELVET's Lumberton — to promote what he firmly believes is the future of mental hygiene: the transorbital lobotomy, during which a long ice-pick is inserted through the patient's eye socket and on into the frontal lobe of the brain. As brutal as it sounds, pretty young Anna Watson (Michelle Williams) thinks a lobotomy might be just what the doctor ordered. Her auditory hallucinations of a crying baby have become increasingly frequent, and there's a history of mental illness in the Watson family: Anna's brother, Bobby, returned from WWII convinced that God was a Communist, and spent his remaining years hidden away in a VA psychiatric hospital. Anna's enthusiasm for psychosurgery is only strengthened by the constant barrage of public-service announcements stressing how good mental health is the patriotic duty of all Americans, but her anxieties seem rooted in a far more concrete reality. Since she was a teenager, Anna's been dating Billy (Meat Loaf Aday, doing what might be the worst Pacino impression ever), a temperamental small-time gangster who's just murdered Anna's friend, a kindly club owner (Louis Zorich) whom Billy suspected was flirting with his girl. Anna begs Billy for a lobotomy, and in order to make her happy while simultaneously preventing anyone from mangling her cerebral cortex, Billy orders one of his bagmen, Tom (Tim Guinee), to impersonate a neurologist and convince Anna that she's perfectly healthy. Tom succeeds, but winds up falling in love with the gangster's moll. Ledes curates some fascinating artifacts from the era ("Which World for Susan?", an episode of a National Mental Health Foundation radio program that warns against excessive daydreaming, is a real find), but they're only used to reinforce Ledes' shallow conviction that the mental-hygiene movement was essentially barbaric, and part of a wider cultural effort to stifle individualism; he even goes so far as to draw parallels with the contemporaneous Communist witch hunts. (In the film's most egregious moment, Ledes ties electroshock therapy to the Rosenbergs' electrocution.) Ledes' refusal to see this complex and sometimes tragic history in anything but the most sinister light possible, depicting neurologists as greedy, ice-pick-wielding Dr. Caligaris, and his conviction that "Hey, we're all a little crazy," is as heartless as it is misguided. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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