Dr. Toby Green (Bruce Greenwood) is ill-prepared for the devious manipulations of psychiatric patient Michael Aleen (Xavier Dolan), as he visits him for the first time on Christmas Eve, at his long term care facility.
Aleen, the unwanted son of a legendary opera singer, skilfully exploits Green's palliative expectations, expediently employing cunning and subterfuge, prevaricative expertise, with goals in mind.
Artfully engaged in indirect communication, they painstakingly proceed through a kaleidoscopic array of circumlocution, Dr. Green unconvincingly naive, unprofessionally struck by Aleen's dazzling intellect.
His disingenuous merit.
To which he cannot rhetorically respond.
It's the film's weakest point.
It's hard to believe someone that accomplished would fall for Aleen's tricks so quickly, so easily, even on Christmas Eve, and sincerely keep up the same level of trust for so long, having been so effortlessly duped from the outset.
Masterfully.
Why does he maintain the level of trust?
Frustratingly quilled yet mesmerizingly insouciant, Charles Binamé's Elephant Song still ambivalently deconstructs relational therapeutics, 2 steps forward, 2 steps back, patient bilateral supplications.
The application of learning.
To heartaching horizons.
*Dolan's that good in English too. Impresario.
**I'm not against employing clichés in writing, but they need to be worked in with carefully placed well-timed elasticity, to thrivingly live again.
***As the crow flies . . . ;)
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