PG | 2 h 3 min | Drama | 1987
“Beauty may be skin-deep, but ugliness goes clear to the bone.” That adage encapsulates David Lynch’s film, “The Elephant Man,” which suggests that beauty is as beauty does. What’s inside a man (a sensitive soul and mind) ennobles him, not what’s outside (attractive skin, complexion, build, hair, or voice).
The film fictionalizes the life of an impossibly disfigured 19th-century Londoner, Joseph Merrick (John Hurt). Something of an outcast, the real-life Merrick found sustenance by offering his hideous appearance as a circus attraction while he sought societal acceptance.
In the film, Merrick’s (John, in the film) mother, presumed pregnant with him at the time, is believed to have been injured by an elephant. He’s supposed to have inherited—how doesn’t matter—an elephantine hide, skull, face, and limbs. Worse, they’re so grotesquely disproportionate to his very human size that he ends up at a freak show, hooded and hidden, except when on display.
London Hospital surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) pays Merrick’s ruthless minder Bytes (Freddie Jones) to release him, have him examined, and then presented to scientific colleagues. Inured to most congenital aberrations, they’re stunned to see a man forced to sleep with his bulbous head propped on his knees; he’ll asphyxiate if he sleeps on his back. He appears mute, so everyone assumes he’s also mad, save Treves, who oversees his care, hoping for some manner of rehabilitation if not outright cure.
Hospital Governor Carr Gomm (John Gielgud) prefers such “incurables” elsewhere, but no hospital will take Merrick. Matron Mrs. Mothershead (Wendy Hiller) is unfazed, but younger nurses find his disfigurement disconcerting. Gomm changes his mind when he finds, true to Treves’s conviction, that Merrick can converse uncoached. Tutored by Treves, Merrick learns to socialize. He’s convinced that people fear what they can’t understand. So he tries to understand (and be understood) better, hoping that mutual fear will fade.
His wider, higher social circle includes Mrs. Treves (Hannah Gordon), stage actress Madge Kendal (Anne Bancroft), and Alexandra, Princess of Wales (Helen Ryan). Word spreads, lending Merrick a sense of normalcy. But the exploitative Bytes and his ilk remind Merrick of the lingering prospect of a return to his years as a captive.
Mothershead warns Treves: Isn’t Merrick becoming a curiosity all over again, only better dressed? As Treves wonders if he’s erred, Bytes reenters Merrick’s life, as he had threatened. Unlike Merrick, Bytes may be whole on the outside, but his ugliness goes clear to the bone.
Excellent Cast
Here, Hurt and Mr. Hopkins are contrasts in appearance but alike in noble conduct. Handsome Hopkins resembles a refined Londoner. Hurt, hidden under layers of ingenious makeup, projects an innate if helpless virtue. Christopher Tucker didn’t win an Oscar for makeup because that category didn’t exist then; it emerged the following year after outcry over such an unsung craft.Ms. Gordon is incredible as Mrs. Treves. In a four-minute scene, she shows how to treat people as equals, not just in words but in expressions too. Seeing Merrick for the first time, over tea, she stops in her tracks, eyes fluttering as she processes the startling image. Then she composes herself, offers her hand, smiles, and says, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Merrick.” It’s a herculean effort for Mrs. Treves, but Gordon shows her making it.
Merrick weeps, unused to being “treated so well by a beautiful woman.” Silent, she’s pained at his inner torture. It’s only after her husband leads Merrick out briefly, that in a near-faint she holds herself up by the door, closes her eyes, heaves a sigh, and averts her head before reopening her eyes. Her inner torture involves overcoming her instinctive repulsion, to make Merrick feel at home. Conscious of her struggle, Merrick says movingly, “Sorry I made a spectacle of myself.”
Merrick figures that he was a disappointment to his mother. Hesitantly, but proudly, he parades a prized picture of her to show what an “angel” she was. Mrs. Treves reassures him, “No son as loving as you, could ever be a disappointment.” Merrick longs for his mother: “If she could see me with such lovely friends, ... perhaps she could love me as I am? I’ve tried so hard to be good.”
Smitten by its sheer symmetry, Merrick builds a scale model in his room of a cathedral that’s largely hidden from his window. To get the last details right, he must imagine what he can’t see. Prophetically, Merrick, too, dares those around him to imagine a beauty in him that their eyes can’t quite see.
