HELEN

Are you depressed?  Would you like to be?  Helen can help.

At the start of the film, Helen (Ashley Judd) is a successful university professor with a lovely husband (Goran Visnjic) and a sometimes lovely teenage daughter.  Her life isn’t perfect, but apart from the stress at work and the odd blowout with her daughter, it’s pretty normal.  You couldn’t look at her and identify any one thing that would trigger a severe depression, and yet, that’s exactly what happens.

One ordinary day follows another, crushing Helen’s spirits as effectively as a series of tragedies.  A concert evokes profound feelings of melancholy.  Laundry causes full-on sobbing.  Sometimes the thought of walking from the car all the way inside the house is simply too much.  Bathing, getting out of bed, and working slowly fall by the wayside, and then relationships begin to deteriorate. Soon Helen finds herself living with a troubled student instead of her own family.  It’s a minimally functional situation that serves only to remove Helen from a life she can no longer face.  When her husband implores her to tell him why she’s left home, she says simply, “You remind me of who I used to be.”

Indeed, depression can happen to anyone at any time.  It happens to people with hot, supportive spouses, illustrious careers, and children they love, and it has the insidious power to bring life to a grinding halt.  Helen demonstrates all of this so successfully that it becomes profoundly depressing itself.  As our heroine drags herself through these dark days, the movie goes beyond proving a point.  Are we really learning about depression and its affect on a family, or is this just a showcase for Ashley Judd and her penchant for proving that she’s a pretty girl who’s not afraid to show up with greasy hair and have an ugly cry?

I want to believe Helen is a genuine effort to depict depression realistically so that it can be identified, talked about, and treated - much like an after school special that causes someone somewhere to go, “I live with that too,” and then empowers the person to seek help.  However, the film emphasizes the experience of depression so much that the viewing experience begins to mirror the film.  Instead of educating and enabling, the movie feels like a cold, hard shrug, that says, “This is what it’s like. Pretty sucky, isn’t it?”

DVD NOTES

Extra features include interviews with Ashley Judd, Goran Visnjic, Alexia Fast, and Lauren Lee Smith.