Beautiful Dreamers (PG-13)
IMDb; National Film Board of Canada; Rotten Tomatoes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: none that I know of

This is a 1990 Canadian movie that I saw on TV sometime in the early 90s. Since then, I've searched for a DVD of it online, but the only thing I ever saw was an entry on Amazon for something that was unavailable. Until finally I found a site, Classic Movies etc., that sells an MOD, all-regions DVD, and I finally ordered it in 2020. (There were at least a couple of glitches in the video, but it mostly played alright. And the cover art is a bit blurry, especially the text.) Anyway, it's nice to have finally seen it again. Until I did, I assumed I'd file my review under "period pieces," but now I've decided to put it in "based on a true story," despite any number of discrepancies between the story and reality. At least I think it's good enough that it's about two real people who really did meet.

It's mostly set in London, Ontario, in 1880, where we first meet Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (Colm Feore), the superintendent of the London Asylum for the Insane. (Incidentally, throughout the film he is sometimes called by each of his names, either Richard, or Bucke, or Maurice, which is pronounced "Morris.") He's not pleased with the normal treatments used on mental patients at that time, which seem barbaric by today's standards. Anyway, he writes a paper about a theory of his, the "sympathetic nervous system," though his theory is not about what that phrase means today. His idea was that humans have a system that controls emotions, and that emotions control thoughts. So to treat a patient's thoughts, one must first reach out to their emotions. He goes to Philadelphia to present his paper at a psychiatric conference, but he's deeply troubled by a presentation he sees there, in which another doctor talked about treating certain mental conditions in women by removing their ovaries. When his time comes to present his paper, he instead makes a speech about the deplorable practices of that time, and his speech impresses a member of the audience, the poet Walt Whitman (Rip Torn).

Whitman later asks Bucke to examine is brother, Eddie, who seems to have some kind of developmental disorder. He wants Bucke's advice about whether to have him committed or continue to care for him at home, and Bucke restates his disdain for the current state of mental hospitals. He then invites Whitman to come with him to stay for awhile at his home in Canada, and to help with his own patients at the London Asylum. By the time they get to London, Bucke has read Whitman's book, "Leaves of Grass" (which I haven't read), and he's become a much more open person, more excited about life in general than he was before. This, I thought, should have made his wife, Jessie, happy, as before his trip, she seemed to want him to be more open. But now she's more concerned about Whitman's scandalous reputation, and how it could affect their social standing, particularly with her Aunt Agatha, as well as Reverend Haines. On the other hand, Maurice and Jessie's daughter, Birdie (Marsha Moreau, whom I knew from My Secret Identity), finds Whitman delightful. (At one point, he gives her a music box that plays the tune "Beautiful Dreamer," which I see more as an amusingly subtle title drop than having anything to do with why the movie is so titled. I think Whitman and Bucke, and later Jessie herself, and really anyone who can come to see the world as Whitman does, are the beautiful dreamers... And I should say, I have no idea if Whitman himself has used that phrase in any of his writing or not.)

Anyway... Bucke does his best to try to change people's minds about his mental patients. (We only really get to know two of them at all, Leonard Thomas and Molly Jessup. But neither of them do much intelligible speaking, though their conditions are quite different.) Actually, one of my problems with the movie is just how intensely not-fit-for-society all the patients seem to be. Like, there's no one who just seems to have any mild problems. But I suppose in those days, people with mild emotional problems basically just suffered in silence, hid their pain, lived as close to normal lives as they could. I also suppose part of the problems with the patients was actually caused by the treatments, which likely served to worsen their conditions rather than bettering them. ...I would say Jessie herself was one of the former types, the suffer in silence type. But little by little, she does come around to Whitman's way of thinking about life, and finally becomes even more open than her husband. So that's good. And I don't know what else to say, except that the movie basically has a (rather abrupt) happy ending.