Canvas

Coping with Madness
CANVAS is an autobiographical story by writer/director Joseph Greco and knowing that fact helps to forgive some of the weaknesses of the film. The story - how a family copes with the presence of paranoid schizophrenia and survives - comes from the heart and is as frank a film about the subject of mental illness as any out there. And for all the inherent tendencies to play it as a soap opera, the overriding effect is one of sharing lives challenged by the presence of a crushing disease.

Mary Marino (Marcia Gay Harden) has been afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia for nearly two years and her disease has affected her marriage to her working husband John (Joe Pantoliano in his best role to date) and her eleven year old son Chris (Devon Gearhart): John misses work to care for Mary and still pay for her mounting hospitalization and medical bills and Chris suffers abuse form his mocking school friends, frequently having to explain away his mother's erratic behavior. Mary paints...

Wonderful performances, absorbing story.
I almost didn't see this film. I just tuned it in on Cablevision Movies on Demand. Oscar winner (for "Pollock") Marcia Gay Harden gives a bravura performance as Mary, the wife and mother who had suffered a psychotic break about 18 months before this story begins, and whose denial that she needs continuing medical help has begun to

lead her once again into bizarre behavior and paranoid delusions, to the extent that she's finally removed from her home by the local police, who have been there many times before. But Harden's portrayal is so nuanced that we can see the loving wife and mother and the scared person inside. As Mary's frustrated, but fiercly protective and loving husband John, Joey Pantoliano is first-rate. I know I've seen him in a lot of other things, but this was the film that made me realize exactly how good he is.

But Mary's illness is only part of the story. When she's hospitalized (and in the scene where John and son Chris first go to the...

Authentic Portrayal of a Child with a Schizophrenic Parent
I have to admit that it was hard for me to watch this movie. A little seven-year-old girl somehow found our family many years ago. When we learned that her mom suffered from schizophrenia we told her that whenever her mom was off her medicine, and she didn't make a meal, this little girl should come to our house and we'd feed her. Over the years, she also slept at our house many times. Her last day of high school she ate breakfast with our kids and said she was really going to miss those times as part of our family. [She, now successful in her work, still is an important part of our family over a decade later.] As I watched this movie, it was like watching our unofficial daughter's experience all over again.

I don't think I need to say more about the authenticity of this movie. I just wish we'd had this movie when this little girl was still ten. It would have helped two ways: it would have helped her to know that other kids had to deal with the same kind of mother...

Click to Editorial Reviews