Three Identical Strangers
Original post date: 16 February 2019
Rating: ✭✭✭✰
Like many really good documentaries, this one adopts the trappings of a genre feature film. It begins more or less as a comedy of coincidences with Bobby and David enthusiastically recounting how they and their fellow separated-at-birth brother Eddy met in the year 1980 at the age of 19. They had all grown up in the New York area and the multiple coincidences in their divergent lives went beyond simple genetics. In the second half, however, things take a dark turn as we learn about the three families’ efforts to understand how the brothers came to be separated and placed in the way that they were. A journalist, investigating independently the experiments carried out on twins and triplets in the latter 20th century, fills in some of the gaps, as does the UK-based filmmaker of this doc, Tim Wardle, with his own digging. As the brothers’ story gave them their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, there is plenty of footage of them during the happy years after their reunion, including chats with the likes of Tom Brokaw and Phil Donohue and even a cameo in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan. There is definitely something uncanny in the way the boys move and speak in unison. The film also includes re-enactments, something I am not particularly a fan of in docs, but these are handled well in that they merely suggest events, seen at a remove, rather than fully dramatizing them. In the latter stretch, the film takes on the tone of a thriller, with the growing mystery nearly aping the paranoid/conspiracy feel of an X-Files episode. The film’s sympathy is firmly with the families and against the deceptions that were practiced when the children were adopted. Louise Wise, head and namesake of the adoption agency involved, seen in archive footage, is a made-to-order villain, as is a woman who worked briefly as an assistant to the psychiatrist conducting the experiments. Given that the brothers and their families are all Jewish and this happened relatively soon after World War II, it fairly boggles the mind. There is no concession that the moral tradeoff may be worth it in such experiments, and that’s a moot question in this case anyway since this particular research was never published. We have all had conversations at one time or another about whether human character is formed more by “nature or nurture,” and we may even have found ourselves quoting an article we have read on the subject. This movie makes you question exactly where that scientific information comes from and whether it is worth having.
Rating: ✭✭✭✰
Like many really good documentaries, this one adopts the trappings of a genre feature film. It begins more or less as a comedy of coincidences with Bobby and David enthusiastically recounting how they and their fellow separated-at-birth brother Eddy met in the year 1980 at the age of 19. They had all grown up in the New York area and the multiple coincidences in their divergent lives went beyond simple genetics. In the second half, however, things take a dark turn as we learn about the three families’ efforts to understand how the brothers came to be separated and placed in the way that they were. A journalist, investigating independently the experiments carried out on twins and triplets in the latter 20th century, fills in some of the gaps, as does the UK-based filmmaker of this doc, Tim Wardle, with his own digging. As the brothers’ story gave them their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, there is plenty of footage of them during the happy years after their reunion, including chats with the likes of Tom Brokaw and Phil Donohue and even a cameo in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan. There is definitely something uncanny in the way the boys move and speak in unison. The film also includes re-enactments, something I am not particularly a fan of in docs, but these are handled well in that they merely suggest events, seen at a remove, rather than fully dramatizing them. In the latter stretch, the film takes on the tone of a thriller, with the growing mystery nearly aping the paranoid/conspiracy feel of an X-Files episode. The film’s sympathy is firmly with the families and against the deceptions that were practiced when the children were adopted. Louise Wise, head and namesake of the adoption agency involved, seen in archive footage, is a made-to-order villain, as is a woman who worked briefly as an assistant to the psychiatrist conducting the experiments. Given that the brothers and their families are all Jewish and this happened relatively soon after World War II, it fairly boggles the mind. There is no concession that the moral tradeoff may be worth it in such experiments, and that’s a moot question in this case anyway since this particular research was never published. We have all had conversations at one time or another about whether human character is formed more by “nature or nurture,” and we may even have found ourselves quoting an article we have read on the subject. This movie makes you question exactly where that scientific information comes from and whether it is worth having.
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