Movie Review – Touched with Fire

While watching this Touched with Fire, it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen Katie Holmes in anything in a while and I was reminded that outside of being splashed across tabloids, she’s a talented actress with a soft voice. Holmes plays Carla, a manic bipolar poet in psychiatric care. Carla signs her self in psychiatric care “for one night” only to be told she can’t leave. It is there that she meets another bipolar poet named Marco (Luke Kirby).
If Carla is trying to fly under the radar and appease to the doctors so she could be released earlier, Marco is shouting from the rooftops how wonderful it is to be bipolar and how all the true artists throughout time have been bipolar. Marco has the conviction of a cult leader. Riling up other patients and expressing any and every opinion he has. Initially irritated by his personality, eventually Carla too decides to give up her meds if you will, and match Marco’s manic behavior with her own.
Everyone from the doctors to their parents try to keep Marco and Carla away from one another because they set one another off in such a way that they are dangerous and impulsive but in love. Another constant component I enjoyed throughout was the music, dazzling selections that may be a little too constant for some, but what I found really set the mood with lots of bells. Almost sounds I would think Marco and Carla could hear. We have two people that don’t want to dilute their creativeness with lithium and other heavy medicine. Touched with Fire was certainly a different approach to the “crazy” person character so many actors have gone for and so many writers have written about because while Marco looks down on normal people of the “earth” who are constantly medicated, Carla begins to miss feeling “normal” so to speak.
When they decide that they will start to take their medication so as to continue their life together, Marco struggles. This film will resonate with anyone who has had any sort of mood shifting medication. There’s a fog that you see life through and apparently that foggy veil is lifted when you have this kind of disorder, everything is heightened. Almost like artists who take drugs so they can see more clearly, or so we think until Marco reveals that he doesn’t simply want to avoid medication so he can have access to his range of emotions.
“I don’t want the full emotion! I want the mania.” Marco yells.
Instantly, I was reminded of the documentary Amy about Amy Winehouse and her relationship with a fellow drug addict. Things never seem to work when one person wants to get sober (or take their meds in Carla’s case) and one does not. Things you initially related to one another about, are no longer existent. Touched with Fire gives insight to a world many of us think we know about with our textbook definitions of bipolar mood disorder and manic episodes. With real feeling conveyed through the screen we begin to understand how fire feels.