Funny, You Don't Look Sick; Safe

The fictional Carol White (Julianne Moore), is an affluent, rather vapid, housewife who--to put it mildly--is a first-class wimp. In Todd Haynes' Safe, smoke gags her, aftershave makes her upchuck, and a whiff of cleaning solvents sends her into a dead faint. Her doctor can find no physiological basis for Carol's illness, and therefore hands her off to a psychiatrist. But, Carol's condition does not improve: on the contrary, she develops extreme fatigue, pointedly avoids sexual relations with her husband, and begins trying fad treatments such as "juice" diets. Eventually, Carol moves to a New Age retreat peopled by clients who may actually be sick and/or may just be crystal-worshipping wackos. We never really know, and therein lies the major problem with Safe. Writer/director Haynes' has done his homework on multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) and Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS, a.k.a. CFS), but rather than offer an illuminating film about a baffling 20th century disease, he chooses to offer a distant, satiric, ultimately cryptic movie: does she or doesn't she...nobody knows for sure, and, frankly, Safe doesn't make us care. Carol White is one of the most unpleasant heroines to grace the silver screen in quite some time: almost every sentence she says is pronounced as a question...so much so that her very existence seems to be tenuous, at best. If she were the brooding, reflective type, this tentativeness might be appealing, but Haynes--for whatever reason--chooses to portray Carol as the quintessential airhead, whose major life decisions revolve around concerns such as getting the right colored living room couch. When Carol isn't busy saying something boring, she's doing something boring--she has a real penchant for standing and looking off into the distance for long periods, and Haynes, who apparently doesn't fully comprehend the power of a VCR remote's fast-forward button, lets the camera languish on these static moments ad infinitum.Ultimately, Safe chooses to play it safe. Viewers--or at least the small minority who stick around until the closing credits--come away feeling cheated. Rather than truly explore a condition which is gaining greater media attention by the week, Haynes uses Carol White's illness as nothing more than a backdrop for a rather tiresome little art film. A strictly optional purchase.Susan Abod, the "star" and co-producer of Funny, You Don't Look Sick, is the opposite of Carol White in almost every sense except one: she too suffers from CFIDS and MCS. A singer/performer, Abod's decade-long bout with CFIDS/MCS began with a bad case of the flu, and progressed through a series of symptoms now considered classic in a diagnosis of CFIDS and/or MCS: fatigue, recurrent sore throat, poor concentration, weak and achy muscles, and short-term memory loss. The documentary, which takes a serious, though often humorous, look at the illness, was shot over an 18-month period with director/co-producer Lisa Pontopiddan, and follows Abod as she visits her doctors, works with meditation (the illness' symptoms worsen with stress, which is in keeping with some researcher's beliefs that it may be caused by a retrovirus), and tours her environmentally "safe" house. In fact, part of Abod's quest during the film is to locate a new apartment that literally won't make her sick(er). As she takes viewers on a tour--showing us the refrigerator (which can't stay in the kitchen because of the chemicals), the out-gassing room (for new clothes that need to lose the dye smell that brings on an allergic reaction in Abod), and her bed in the living room (which is situated far enough away from her neighbor's driveway and attendant gas fumes), we begin to appreciate the peculiar problems that apartment-hunting would pose for someone who can't be around carpet, pets, fresh paint, or new varnish.Although derisively dismissed some years back as the "yuppie flu" (and still the subject of a lot of skepticism from ignorant medical practitioners), CFIDS has recently been moved by the Center for Disease Control (remember those weird-suited folk in Outbreak?) to a priority one status on the list of new and emerging diseases. Researchers in the field are only now beginning to realize that the prevalence of the condition amongst the general population is much higher than was imagined and a whole body of literature is appearing in bookstores on the subject. Susan Abod's story puts a human face on this debilitating illness which robs people of their energy and plays havoc with their immune system responses. When Abod wistfully lists pleasures she misses--afghans, coffee, browsing through the mall--we begin to comprehend both the magnitude of the losses and how much we take for granted. But, as Laurie Garrett's popular and frightening new book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance suggests, we ignore these human health signals (like CFIDS and MCS) at our collective peril. An excellent and very affordably priced documentary. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)[Blu-ray/DVD Review—Dec. 2, 2014—Criterion, 119 min., R, DVD: 2 discs, $29.95; Blu-ray: $39.95—Making its latest appearance on DVD and debut on Blu-ray, 1995's Safe features a fine transfer and an uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray release. Extras include audio commentary (by director Todd Haynes, star Julianne Moore, and producer Christine Vachon), a new conversation between Haynes and Moore (36 min.), Haynes's 1978 short film “The Suicide” (21 min.), a new interview with Vachon (16 min.), a trailer, and an essay by critic Dennis Lim. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a cryptic and ultimately disappointing film.]