I am not schizophrenic, but I identified very deeply with “Julien Donkey-Boy.” If you have ever struggled with mental illness — and can handle the movie’s distinctly “indie” style — I suspect you will too.
Like many films written and directed by Harmony Korine, there isn’t much in the way of a plot in “Julien Donkey-Boy,” but that’s as it should be. This is a movie about a young man with untreated schizophrenia (Ewen Bremner) and the way that life seems disjointed, overwhelming and scary to him. We can sense that he has done terrible things (murder a young boy, engage in incest with his sister), but also that he isn’t capable of understanding the ramifications of his actions in more than a perfunctory way. He is an innocent soul trapped in a brain that keeps misfiring, inhabiting a world that regularly traumatizes himself and the other characters. Even someone without a debilitating mental illness would struggle to keep up; Julien has no chance of emerging unscathed.
It is here that the movie’s style deserves special attention. “Julien Donkey-Boy” was made as part of the Dogme 95 movement, a filmmaking trend initiated by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that pared down the use of technology and special effects in order to focus more on story and characters. The final movies were inevitably low budget fare, and they felt like it. Based purely on its aesthetic, “Julien Donkey-Boy” feels like the kind of movie you could watch at a pretentious film festival. (The film winks and nods to this fact in a scene where director Werner Herzog, who plays Julien’s abusive father, denounces “artsy fartsy” poetry.)
Yet that approach works extremely well in “Julien Donkey-Boy” precisely because its titular character lives such a materially, spiritually and morally impoverished existence. Lesser movies about mental illness gaze at their subjects from a rigidly neurotypical perspective, sometimes sympathizing with them but never managing to adapt their mindset. “Julien Donkey-Boy” forces us to see the world through the main character’s eyes… and it would be inappropriate, if not unseemly, for those eyes to perceive things with high production values, state of the art special effects and a maudlin score.
What a movie like this needs is solid writing, which Korine dutifully supplies, and top notch acting, which it gets through the performances of Bremner, Herzog and Chloë Sevigny as Julien’s sister. It also needs scenes that are intrinsically interesting as self-contained vignettes, which “Julien Donkey-Boy” has in spades, and an ability to add those scenes up into something special. “Julien Donkey-Boy” accomplishes that as well.
The emotional gut punch of the film comes at the very end, when we learn that it was inspired by Korine’s own uncle, who was also schizophrenic. While I don’t question that Korine was partially motivated by a desire to pay tribute to a relative, I can’t shake the sense that he was also making a movie about himself. Korine may not be schizophrenic — at least one critic speculated that he has autism, and while I avoid diagnosing people, I can say as an autist myself that his interviews do give off signs that he is on the spectrum — but he clearly understands how being mentally atypical can isolate you from society, and also yourself.
That, I believe, is the main theme of “Julien Donkey-Boy.” On its surface it is a slice of life into the mind of a schizophrenic man growing up in a toxic world. Beneath that skin, though, there pulses a full-blooded story about how the world makes so little sense to anyone who isn’t sound of mind. And perhaps even less so to those who are.