A Film to Make You Think

The Million Dollar Hotel directed by Wim Wenders; on worldwide release, 2000

What really distinguishes the US is the equanimity with which the majority contemplates the poverty of a minority.¹

What remains to be wrested from experience when one has lost everything, and everyone, and there is no getting back into the world that was lost? These questions are difficult to answer in contemporary urban psychiatry. Yet, our patients face them every day. Sometimes this leads to despair or [UNK]suicide. Sometimes something “other” emerges that takes the observing physician by surprise.

In The Million Dollar Hotel, film director Wim Wenders brings his unflinching gaze to the subject of social exclusion. He focuses on a group of characters living in a squalid hotel in Los Angeles, each of whom lacks health insurance. Wenders often studies groups of protagonists, whether in a [UNK],the underworld, or a dance band. Most famously, in Wings of Desire,he gave us a portrait of angels who visited the libraries of Berlin to watch the city's inhabitants.²

In his other films, salvation was achieved through beauty. His new film slowly and honestly portrays awkwardness and ugliness. We watch the [UNK]struggling to exist outside conventional society. They form an unfortunate distillate of brain-damaged, demented, addicted, psychopathic, or [UNK]people. The subject matter will not appeal to all. At the screening I attended, a third of the audience left before the end. Yet, [UNK] film repays our attention. The mesmerizing final 10 minutes alone justify sitting through the slow opening. His conclusion, as so often in his work, is that life is[UNK]. And, to Wenders's enduring credit, the viewer ends up concurring with this message.

The plot is simple. A resident dies by falling from the roof of the hotel.A mysterious private detective (played by Mel Gibson) arrives to investigate.We are not told how the residents, who live in poverty, could have afforded his fee. We gradually learn of his remit and of his own conflicts. Like many of the residents, he too, has experienced institutionalization.

Wenders revisits images from his earlier films—the death by falling in Wings of Desire, the ubiquity of modern surveillance techniques inThe End of Violence, and the simultaneous view of many lives through many windows inBeyond the Clouds, which he codirected with Antonioni.He uses light and skies, and the natural, real time of human interaction.Crucially, his gaze remains on what many might find distasteful.

Finally, through a love story that evolves between a damaged man and a girl who may have autism or schizophrenia, Wenders concludes with a sacrificial act of enormous kindness.

Many psychiatrists will recognize an inherent truthfulness in this film. We see how dignity may exist amid squalor, exploitation, and exclusion. [UNK] of the actions portrayed in this film lack coherence, but then, that may be true of life. Either way, it is no less beautiful.