“Words Written on Bathroom Walls” (MA)
WHEN movie makers, novelists and other kinds of dramatists try to massage schizophrenia into plots for their magnum opuses, one of the difficult problems that they need to resolve is getting inside the head of a sufferer. Wikipedia tells me that genetics, environment and altered brain chemistry and structure may play a role.
The title of Thor Freudenthal’s film about a schizophrenic adolescent boy is a coy American treatment of the common-or-garden variety of names for lavatories. This is no place for a catalogue of possible English-language synonyms. Nick Naveda has adapted a novel by Julia Walton that I surmise may have its genesis in a member of her family. All three have laboured mightily to get it right. They have five types of the complaint to choose from. Have they succeeded? Perhaps. Only a schizophrenic could give a reply capable of withstanding professional evaluation and even then there’s an 80 per cent chance of not get