My Psychedelic Love Story (2020)
dir. Errol Morris
Rated: TV-14
image: ©2020 Showtime Networks
The fatal flaw of documentarian Errol Morris’s latest film, My Psychedelic Love Story, can be summed up in one quote from the movie’s subject, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. At one point during an interview, Harcourt-Smith is relating that one of her lovers died. She says that she felt like the man was killed, then immediately follows up that assertion by saying, “You know, don’t ask me for any proof.” If that caveat doesn’t bother you, then you’ll most likely enjoy My Psychedelic Love Story. If you enjoy listening to someone spin conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory without being bothered to offer the slightest shred of evidence to corroborate any of it, Harcourt-Smith’s tale will be a wild, irresistible ride. If, like me, the prospect of listening to a string of unrelated stories so outlandish that they might have come straight from a QAnon message board makes you want to tear out your hair, avoid Morris’s movie at all costs.
This is master documentarian Morris’s fourth film exclusively built around a series of interviews with a single subject, after The Fog of War, The Unknown Known, and American Dharma. Some critics, this one included, took issue with American Dharma for Morris’s failure to press his subject, Donald Trump campaign adviser and brief Trump administration White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, on his beliefs and assertions of fact. Morris claimed those of us with reservations were missing the point. Morris doesn’t believe in adversarial interviews. He prefers to let his subjects say whatever they want, and he uses dialectical montage – the juxtaposition of two opposing images or statements to comment on one another – to impart a new meaning.
My Psychedelic Love Story is Morris’s approach on steroids. Or rather, LSD.
There’s no argument that Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who died in October of 2020, a month before the film premiered on Showtime, led a tumultuous, unconventional life. Sitting on a couch in a well-appointed home, the story she spins is centered around her roughly five-year love affair with psychologist, psychedelic evangelist, and cultural revolutionary Timothy Leary.
The two met in 1972 and made a deep connection. The only thing that separated them was prison, when they were arrested in Afghanistan and extradited to California. Leary – whom Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America” – had been convicted on drug charges years before and, with the help of the leftist organization the Weather Underground, escaped prison and fled to Algeria.
Leary met the Swiss-born British socialite Harcourt-Smith while he was on the lam in Europe. The two were unofficially married in a drug-fueled ceremony two weeks after they met. According to Harcourt-Smith, the couple took acid together every day for six straight weeks.
The problem at the root of Love Story is the opening clause in that last sentence. All we have to go on – and all Morris offers – is Harcourt-Smith’s recollections and conjectures. She reached out to Morris to tell her story after seeing his 2017 Netflix limited series docudrama, Wormwood. (Coincidentally, I caught up with Wormwood only four months ago and found it fascinating.) The six-episode series chronicles the story of Frank Olson, through reënactments and interviews with Olson’s son, Eric. Frank Olson was a government scientist who mysteriously died after the CIA covertly dosed him with LSD as part of its MKUltra program.
In Wormwood, Eric Olson painstakingly details the research he conducted over decades to uncover, as best he could, the circumstances leading to his father’s death. In direct opposition, Harcourt-Smith offers zero in the way of similar evidence to back up her own story. She pinballs from one wild tale to the next. I’m sure Morris felt giddy with delight each time he rolled tape. Early in the picture, she tells the director that she was compelled to contact him because, like Olson, she felt that the CIA might have used her as an unwitting pawn; in her case, it was to get Leary back to the United States so they could put him behind bars. She speculates just how far back her possible CIA brainwashing – through drugs and mind control – might have gone in order to get she and Leary together to put their plan into action.
It’s a compelling premise, but becomes less so when Harcourt-Smith offers no evidence to back it up. And Morris never bothers to ask follow-up questions. He was probably too fascinated with where his subject would go next. She talks about the importance of tarot cards in her and Leary’s relationship; she name-drops The Rolling Stones in a tale about convincing them to play fundraising concerts for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign; she tells of entering, very briefly, the US Witness Protection Program with Leary after he made a deal to work with the DEA to get out of prison.
While I have no doubt that some of what Harcourt-Smith says is true – she tells two heart-wrenching stories about being molested as a young girl – in total, hearing her wild tale is akin to listening to the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of someone on psychedelics. It’s much less compelling if you aren’t high yourself.
That isn’t to suggest that parts of My Psychedelic Love Story aren’t fascinating. The most interesting revelation from Harcourt-Smith comes in the final minutes of the documentary. I won’t spoil it here, but she gives a possible explanation for why Leary decided to partner with the DEA – his sworn enemy – and it involves a threat from the federal government much more nefarious than simply keeping the drug guru locked up for decades.
Morris, for his part, does give the film a free-wheeling energy, with the help regular collaborator Steven Hathaway’s phantasmagoric editing style. The most inventive visual cue in the film are the hundreds of images Morris turns into sheets of perforated LSD tabs. Each time Harcourt-Smith mentions a new name or location in her story, Morris splashes it in bold, colorful letters across the entire screen. Watching his film while high would probably be its own rewarding experience.
In addition to coincidentally seeing Wormwood a few months ago, I also recently finished a book about the history and possible future of psychedelics, on the recommendation of a friend. It’s called How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, author Michael Pollan makes a convincing case for the therapeutic and clinical benefits of psychedelics, and he gives a detailed overview of what turned the American population-at-large against the mind-expanding drugs in the 1960s and ‘70s – spoiler alert, Timothy Leary had more than a little to do with it.
How to Change Your Mind is a contemplative treatise on the subject. My Psychedelic Love Story is the fun-house mirror version of some of the same issues; it’s fun in parts, but it ultimately distorts the story Morris is trying to tell so much as to make it incoherent.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- My Psychedelic Love Story is kind of a jumbled mess, due to the (most likely unreliable) narrator. It gives me no pleasure to come to this conclusion. My reservations about American Dharma aside, Errol Morris is a brilliant filmmaker. The Thin Blue Line, which got a wrongly convicted man out of prison, in addition to his other titles that I mentioned in the review, are all stellar.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Give Wormwood a look if you have a Netflix subscription. It’s very well-crafted. See also A Wilderness of Error. That’s a limited series not directed by Morris, but based on a true-crime book that he wrote, and he is a central interview subject in the series. It is captivating.
- The style (over substance) of Love Story is its only saving grace. In addition to the frenetic editing and trippy visuals, Morris also brilliantly weaves Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman into a crucial scene.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw My Psychedelic Love Story via an awards screener DVD. It is currently streaming on Showtime’s subscription service (and through the Showtime add-on subscription on Hulu) and on the Fubo subscription service.