You know that one friend who tells you depression shouldn’t be treated with medication, because you could just cut out gluten or eat more kale?
Touched with Fire is 110 minutes of that friend, and it’s just as insufferable as you’d expect. Ostensibly a love story between poets with bipolar disorder who meet in a psych ward, it is actually an extended infomercial for the book it’s based on (by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison) and also maybe for not taking your meds, even though Jamison herself doesn’t advocate that.
Also featured prominently: Winter as a metaphor for depression! No discussion of insurance coverage or the difficulty of accessing mental health care! Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby chomping the scenery, as their characters somehow publish books with alarming frequency, despite never writing anything worth publishing! (I suppose inane rhymes about the sun and moon technically qualify as poetry, but in real life, they’d deservedly end up in a slush pile.)
It all boils down to an offensively cartoonish depiction of bipolar disorder as a gift that needn’t be medicated—which, like, have you ever known someone with untreated bipolar disorder? It’s not all flights of boundless creativity and reckless passion. Untreated mental illness is debilitating.