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2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Keir Dullea stars as David, a teenager whose parents enroll him in a boarding school for the mentally disturbed. David is irrationally afraid that if anyone touches him, he’ll die. While the school’s psychiatrist (Howard Da Silva) tries getting David to talk, a strange girl named Lisa (Janet Margolin) has an easier time of it. Lisa is a suffers from multiple personality disorder and can only speak to people in rhyme. To communicate with her, you have to rhyme back. As David’s parents threaten to take him out of the school, he and Lisa become plutonic friends, helping each other make the first steps in overcoming their debilitating problems.
David & Lisa features dynamic performances from Dullea and Margolin, whose characters suffer manic highs and much more subtle lows. Da Silva is memorable as their even-keeled, reassuring shrink. Eleanor Perry’s screenplay, based on a book by Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, never spoon-feeds viewers and requires some ‘reading between the lines’ to get a full picture of the characters’ back stories. Despite its emotional potential, the film feels a bit flat, never reaching the dramatic highs one might imagine. It’s rhythm is a curious one, too. All the scenes are short and given equal emphasis. It’s as though director Frank Perry is purposefully trying to avoid convention and sentimentality as much as possible, when a few indulgences might have enhanced our emotional engagement with these interesting but off-putting characters. There’s no denying, though, that David & Lisa is an interesting and unusual film, released at a time when stories about mental illness were far from commonplace.
With Neva Patterson, Richard McMurray, and Clifton James (Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun).
Oscar Nominations: Best Director (Frank Perry), Adapted Screenplay (Eleanor Perry)