Recently I was minding my own business, looking for something to watch on Netflix, when I did what everyone who has been in a similar situation has done at one time or another and entered “Valerie Harper” in the search bar. Recommended was not Rhoda, sadly (or, less sadly, Night Terror), but an unfamiliar title called Strange Voices.
The plot description of this 1987 telefilm didn’t sound too promising: When their college-age daughter suddenly begins acting erratically and is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a desperate couple seeks treatment for her. But the casting was enough to catapult any TV movie into the category of “viewing as essential as Children of Paradise and Battleship Potemkin,” for this very special story starred Valerie Harper as one-half of that desperate couple and Nancy McKeon as her daughter.
And so I watched. I watched as director Arthur Allan Seidelman (whose filmography is too robust and amusing to catalog here) established the close-knit relationship enjoyed by college student Nikki Glover (co-executive producer McKeon) and her family: photographer mother Lynn (Harper); financial whiz father Dave (Stephen Macht); and younger sister Lisa (Tricia Leigh Fisher), a clarinet-playing babysitter about to graduate high school. Lisa’s also called upon to scream and cry on several occasions and issued dialogue such as, “Nikki, can I ask you something? Um, do you think that most girls going into college have, you know, like, had like a major sexual experience?”
In true TV movie fashion, it takes all of five minutes or so before things beginning falling apart. Sometimes Nikki, a bright student with a passion for architecture, gets a faraway look in her eyes that’s accompanied by sinister music. It happens at home, it happens at school, it happens when her oddly-creepy-but-not-supposed-to-be boyfriend tries to get romantic with her. (My favorite incident occurred as she was poised to debate a point about Pascal’s theorem with a professor.)
If only these dramatic cues had been audible to her family, they might’ve sought help right around the time she became transfixed by, and suspicious of, her father’s new computer terminal, but alas, Nikki must suffer several breaks from reality before she’s taken to the hospital and her parents are told she has schizophrenia.
Dave reacts with angry denial and gradual, limited understanding, telling doctors things like, “She’s always been the perfect child!” In another scene Lynn cries “I drank champagne at my baby shower!” and blames herself for her daughter’s illness before acknowledging that logic dictates she didn’t cause anything. And in one of several emotional scenes shared by McKeon and Harper, Nikki tearfully tells her mother, “I’m just afraid the voices will get so loud I won’t be able to hear you calling me.”
The campiness of made-for-TV movies, particularly those of the ’80s vintage, is obviously a big part of their appeal, but Strange Voices, despite its cheesier elements (Lynn bristles at the thought of Nikki spending the night with her boyfriend and tells her, “Look, I’m hip, I’m today, I’m now, I’m ’80s. I’m also still your mother!“), has a more business-like agenda: It wants to be informative but glosses over a good half-dozen topics rather than focus intently on one.
The result is that Nikki’s brand of schizophrenia bears only occasional resemblance to the genuine article. Yes, there’s paranoia, as well an explanation of thought broadcasting. There’s resistance to faithful medication-taking and an eventual foray into homelessness. But her psychotic episodes are unconvincing. (Early on, she mainly says mean and inappropriate things to people before graduating to adventures like setting her parents’ kitchen on fire.) And, despite a seizure and complaints about the unpleasant side effects of anti-psychotic medications, short shrift is given to the complexity of any of these issues.
In the final third of the film, Lynn attends a support group where she’s told “About a third of the men and two-thirds of the women in the streets are schizophrenic. They call it deinstitutionalization.” There’s enough in those two sentences (you can read more about deinstitutionalization here and here) for a better, more harrowing movie than Strange Voices, which despite fine performances from all involved was mostly memorable to me because of the way Tricia Leigh Fisher was dressed like she was set to audition for the role of Teen Witch.
“Strange Voices” can also be found on YouTube.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Whamo
I watch this movie. It's great for what it is. At least it was a film about educating folks about what it's like to have a kid with schizophrenia. Which was disappointing though. Most of these made for TVers are craptastic and I wanted it to be like that. Like the "Someone I touched," film on Netflix where all the 70's folks have affairs and get herpes all over the place!