Even the doctor with cancer an attractive character with an astringent sense of humor doesn't emerge as a dominant figure. Instead, Bellevue itself is the focus, the place where doctors and patients wrestle with insanity. Their struggle is often tragic, sometimes comic, almost always grueling because mental illness is so hard to pin down, and that inevitably leads to frustration and terrible sadness. But unlike the dramatists, who use the camera to bring the viewer inside the scenario, the documentary filmmakers keep us mindful that we are watching. They don't edit out moments when patients play to the camera.
Doctors comment on what's happening.
Reality seems oddly safer than fiction, because as voyeurs we can make a distinction between us and them or so we think. One of the patients, a woman named Cheryl, gives speeches. And it's nothing to laugh at. It isn't funny. Perhaps she realizes that she has the potential of seeming a comic character, whose eyeglasses are perpetually asymmetrical one lens whole, one lens taped to the frame.