Helen

Ok, let’s get this out of the way. I am a nutcase. Completely and utterly insane. I am all ate up with anxieties and depression and mood swings and all sorts of crazy shit. I think my fiancé deserves a fucking medal for putting up with my bullshit on a daily basis – it exhausts the fuck out of me, I can’t even imagine the kind of strain it puts on her. I have dealt with a variety of mental health issues for a very long time and so when I saw a movie that promised to put a spotlight on this bitch of an illness, I was all in.

The first thing that struck me about Helen was Ashley Judd. For the first time in a long time she wasn’t stiff as a board or just skimming the surface of the script. She actually gives her character some depth and subtlety that’s been sorely lacking from some of her other work. In this film, she plays the title role, a woman in her 40’s trying to cope with SEVERE depression. I emphasize severe because if you come into this not knowing what the average depressed person deals with day to day, and think that this is typical, well, uh, no, you would be wrong.

I am not going to get too far into the story, because honestly, it isn’t all that likely that anything I say will get you excited to see a movie that goes to such lengths to portray the absolute extremes of a very common mental illness. No, the reason I am reviewing a film that maybe two or three thousand people will ever see is because of how much this thing pisses me off. Being depressed is hard enough on the head – the stigma this attaches to it is a whole other ballgame.

If you’re not depressed and want to know what it’s like, here’s a taste – and to be fair, the first part of the movie portrays this very, very well. There is a kind of mental and emotional distraction, an inability to focus on things consistently – as if there is another conversation taking place in your immediate vicinity that you can’t quite hear but prevents you from fully taking in what is going on around you. There is a nagging and annoying uncertainty, as if you are always missing a crucial piece of information that makes whatever decision or choice you are going to make even harder or more stressful. Perceived and actual consequences have a long distance relationship with each other most of the time, which causes the panic from your perception to have a forceful impact on the actual. For reasons you can’t quite explain, banal, mundane obstacles can paralyze you with impossibility. You become emotionally invested in situations that don’t require it. You’ll think of options and outcomes others might not and it absolutely inhibits you from completing even the simplest of tasks.

Depression just isn’t about sadness. Sadness can be a rational response to a lot of circumstances one encounters in life. Depression as an illness is almost defined by the irrationality of one’s response to the world. As this movie progresses, and the audience becomes more and more exposed to Helen’s histrionics, suicidal tendencies, and dramatic spells of near catatonia, I kept thinking to myself, “Oh fucking hell” because it gives those of us not swinging for the fences of misery a lot to live down to.

I know a LOT of people who live with this illness, and all of us have our own unique symptoms that are every bit as pronounced as the ones we share. Suicidal ideation is a common enough symptom but actually acting out on it? No, most of us have much better impulse control than that. Even depressed people are born with a survival instinct. When the desire to act on irrational thoughts grows, most of us know this means to talk to someone NOW. The anxieties, physical impairments, uncertainty, emotional upheaval and inexplicable errors in judgement most of us deal with are not interesting enough for a paying audience. Electro shock therapy, crying jags, suicidal tendencies and frequent hospitalizations is what Hollywood requires in order to make depression film worthy. I get it, but I don’t like it.

Helen gets a 4 out of 10