May 28, 2004
People Say I'm Crazy
Reviewed
In People
Say I'm Crazy, a
fascinating and moving personal documentary, we meet a young artist named John
Cadigan, who suffered a psychotic break in his early 20s and has been coping
with its symptoms ever since. Plump and bearded, Cadigan looks like a
melancholy Kevin Smith. As he goes about his days in a Bay Area boardinghouse,
he gives us a running commentary on what's sliding around in his mind -- the
paranoia and depression, the gruesome delusions that he is always working to
keep at bay. Cadigan, who co-directed the film, never regards his schizophrenia
as less than a spiritual aspect of his being, so his struggle to transcend it
is far from clinical. A gifted printmaker who carves intricate patterns out of
wood, often with a shadow demon running through them, he notes that the
thrusting labor required of this art amounts to a daily sublimation of
violence. People Say IÕm Crazy doesnÕt defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental
illness. It humanizes it.