Invasion of the Mind Snatcher

By RICHARD CORLISS

ALTERED STATES Directed by Ken Russell; Screenplay by Sidney Aaron

This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It's an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring--into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit. The film changes tone, even form, with its hero's every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer's mind out through his eyes and ears. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States.

Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) is a professor at the Harvard Medical School. Years before, he had studied the nature of schizophrenia by immersing his subjects--and later himself--in a dark tank of warm water. Now, continuing his experiment under the apprehensive eyes of his wife Emily (Blair Brown) and his colleagues (Bob Balaban and Charles Haid), Eddie determines that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states. And that reality can be externalized." He imagines, or remembers, himself as primitive man; he becomes that lithe, voracious ape-human.

He views the birth of the world, of the soul; he enters into it, becomes it. Clearly, the experiments of this modern mad scientist have got out of hand --and too far into himself. Can he return? This is a question whose application here can be debated and debunked by those familiar with the work of Dr. John Lilly, the behavioral scientist whose use of tank therapy prefigured Eddie's. But most moviegoers will be enthralled by the fiction in this dazzling piece of science fiction.

Still, this is a love story? Yes: of man as the eternally curious child and woman as the maternal source and resource. It is also, implicitly, the story of Jesus and Mary. Eddie is consumed by the dream of transcendence, of return to the modern godhead of the self. He is off on a perilous trip down through the memory of the race, and his only connection to reality is the umbilical cord of his need and, finally, his love for Emily. He often curls naked into her side as if wounded, seeking succor, reliving the Pieta. Again and again, Eddie dies and is reborn; each time he finds the action frightening, and "supremely satisfying." At the end, the couple fuse and are redeemed through the power of love. Altered States opens in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day.

One expected some kind of combustion from the meeting of those sacred zanies, Paddy Chayefsky and Ken Russell, but one hardly dared hope it would be so splendid. Chayefsky had already veered from the nice-guy naturalism of Marty, onto the fast track of madhouse satire:

The Hospital and Network. As for Russell, he was always the cinema's dilly Dali, running amuck through the lives of the great composers like a hyperactive adolescent, bull-whipping his characters to altered states of frenzy. When Russell took over the direction of Chayefsky's screenplay, irresistible force met immovable object, and the force was with Russell. Distressed by the intensity of the performances and the headlong pace at which the actors read his dialogue, Chayefsky took his name off the script and replaced it with the pseudonym Sidney Aaron (his actual given names).

It is still, in great part, his movie. No body else can move from behavioral parody to dead-serious paranoia the way Chayefsky did with Network. In Altered States he has gone further, higher, conceptualizing great notions like a tragic tenor in an orgiastic Rand opera. And no one else can overwrite as Chayefsky can. His characters are endlessly reflective and articulate, spitting out litanies of adjectives, geysers of abstract nouns, chemical chains of relative clauses. Says Emily of Eddie:

"Reality to him is only that which is changeless, immutably constant." (A double redundancy! "That which!") And yet Chayefsky's voluptuous verbosity is a welcome antidote to all those recent dialogues of the carnalites -- movies in which brutal characters speak only words of one syllable and four letters. Chayefsky's people are scientists in the throes of conceptual passion; they have built their careers on -- and are ready to sacrifice themselves for -- their ideas. Verbal and sensory over load is the strategy of Altered States: it layers word on word, thought on thought, image on spectacular image. Too much here is just enough.

The movie is also, and ultimately, Russell's. He succeeded Arthur Perm as director, with a cast of unknowns chosen by Perm, and gets an erotic, neurotic charge from the talking-heads scenes that recall Penn at his best. From William Hurt he got something more: a star performance of contorted intensity, mandarin charm and sleek sensuality. Russell's direction of actors and camera has never been so cagey, so controlled, so alive to the nuances of language and personality. Or chestrating the efforts of a superb production team -- and of the reluctant Mr.

Chayefsky -- Russell has devised a film experience that will astound some viewers, outrage others and bore nobody. Laugh with it, scream at it, think about it.

You may leave the theater in an altered state.

-- By Richard Corliss

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