Twin Falls Idaho
USA 1998
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
US, the present. A hooker, Penny, is called to the Imperial Hotel on Idaho Avenue. Her client, Francis Falls, is a conjoined twin with brother Blake. She runs away, leaving her handbag behind. Returning for it, she starts to feel sympathy for the twins; when Francis gets sick, she stays overnight and gets her doctor, Miles, to help. She learns that the twins were abandoned at birth by their mother and were adopted.
Penny invites the twins to a Halloween party. Back at her apartment she and Blake start to make love, but stop when Francis wakes up. In Penny's absence her pimp, Jay Harrison, shows up and enthuses over the twins' showbiz potential. They flee, attracting a crowd in the street, and lock themselves in their apartment, refusing to let Penny in.
Blake and Francis fight. Francis is fatally weakened. They're discovered by their neighbour, preacher Jesus; he takes them to hospital, where Penny visits them. She tracks down their mother and begs her to see her sons. The twins are separated as the only way of saving Blake, and Francis dies. Later Penny visits Blake, now a disabled recluse, and they duet on the guitar the twins used to play.
Review
There's a touching moment in Tod Browning's classic Freaks (1932) when one of a pair of conjoined twins is kissed by her fiancé. Her sister, who has been tactfully reading, ignoring their love talk, looks up with an involuntary shiver of pleasure. Twin Falls Idaho, the exceptional first feature from the Polish Brothers' explores the implications of that moment to their fullest and darkest extent. And, like Browning's film (or like David Lynch's The Elephant Man, 1980), it reaches a bitter if predictable conclusion as to who the real freaks are - most trenchantly in the scene where Siamese twins Blake and Francis, fleeing from Penny's salivatingly venal pimp, huddle protectively together in a scruffy downtown recreation ground as a gawping crowd collects. "We didn't have a problem," Blake tells Penny, recalling the twins' years as circus artistes. "The audience who came to see us did."
There are echoes of Lynch, too, in the texture of the film, especially the early scenes in the terminally cruddy Imperial Hotel with its gurgling faucets, sputtering bathroom lights and consciously wacky denizens. ("Fifty-two years - and I have yet to guess the desired floor," laments the wizened old lift operator.) But the film soon establishes a tone, and vision, of its own, thanks to the subdued intensity and utter conviction of its twin lead performances. That Mark and Michael Polish are in fact identical (though not conjoined) twins obviously helped those qualities no end. But that isn't in any way to diminish their achievement: not only scripting and starring in the film, but creating it while strapped into what sounds like a horrendously uncomfortable double harness throughout the 17-day shoot. What makes it all the more impressive is that the central illusion (the Falls twins share three legs and two arms between them) is effected purely with old-fashioned camera wizardry and carefully worked-out angles; not a single element has been computer-generated.
Twin Falls Idaho treads a sure-footed path between poignancy and ironic humour. "Maybe I'll call you when I'm single," Blake tells Penny, and there's a diverting episode when the twins, liberated for once into a world where they can fit in, go trick-or-treating at Halloween. "Why, you look quite real," gasps a startled nun. "You look real too," they respond politely.
It's largely through Blake that we gain insights into the brothers' condition, since he's the one who talks more to Penny, our surrogate (a warm, appealingly tentative performance from Michele Hicks). Vividly expressing the mixture of tenderness and resentment the twins feel towards each other, he talks of "the two minutes a day when I feel alone: the minute when I wake up and the minute when I fall asleep. Two minutes to remind me of who I am." But 'who he is' is inextricable from his dual identity with his brother. "Blake will live a normal life when I go," says Francis wistfully; but the film's melancholy coda, after Francis' death, shows this to be no more than wishful thinking. Blake's incomplete body (he lacks a left arm, and his left leg is vestigial) mirrors his spiritual state: without his twin Blake will always be less than whole, and even Penny's comforting presence can be no substitute. It's a bleak, honest ending to a courageous film.
Credits
- Director
- Michael Polish
- Producers
- Marshall Persinger
- Rena Ronson
- Steven J. Wolfe
- Screenplay
- Mark Polish
- Michael Polish
- Director of Photography
- M. David Mullen
- Editor
- Leo Trombetta
- Production Designer
- Warren Alan Young
- Music/Music Performer
- Stuart Matthewman
- © Twin Falls Production, LLC
- Production Companies
- Seattle Pacific Investments and The Fresh Produce Company in association with
- Steven J. Wolfe and Sneak Preview Entertainment present
- a Rena Ronson production
- a Polish Brothers picture
- Executive Producer
- Joyce Schweickert
- Co-producer
- Paul Torok
- Associate Producers
- David Cohn
- Jon Gries
- Julie Lynn
- Production Co-ordinator
- Cathy Vlasuk
- Unit Production Manager
- Olivia Nagel
- Unit Manager
- Ted Abenheim
- Assistant Directors
- Andrew Miller
- Adam George
- Monica M. Kenyon
- Script Supervisor
- Patrick Miller
- Casting Associate
- Heather Nunn
- Steadicam Operator
- Kenji Luster
- Art Director
- Grace Li
- Set Decorator
- Alysia D. Allen
- Costume Designer
- Bic Owen
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Ann Madden
- Key Make-up
- Jo Strettell
- 'Twin' Make-up Effects
- Gary J. Tunnicliffe
- Effects Crew:
- Mike Regan
- Claire Jane Deacon
- Bill Zahn
- Denise Baer
- Dave Perteet
- David Selvadurai
- Conjoined Twin Body Rig
- Bic Owen
- Key Hair
- Noriko Kerns
- Main Titles
- David Moquay
- Opticals
- Cinema Research Corporation
- Orchestrations/Conductor
- Rob Mathus
- Strings Arrangers
- Stuart Matthewman
- Rob Mathus
- Score Producer/Mixer
- Stuart Matthewman
- Strings Recordist
- Bob 'Bassy' Brockman
- Soundtrack
- "Dream", "It Haunts You" - Rob Mathus, "Lullaby" - Fong Nam; "Amapola" - Stuart Matthewman, Sandy Park, Rob Mathus;
- "Intense Dub", "Mystery Dub", "Edge Test One", "Mirrorball" - Cottonbelly; "When Did You Leave Heaven" - Lisa Ekdahl; "Wish" - Mark Polish, Michael Polish; "How Great Thou Art" - Aubrey Ghent; "Job" - The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet; "Don't Grow" - Marc Anthony Thompson
- Sound Mixer
- Matthew Nicolay
- Re-recording Mixers
- André Perreault
- Derek Marcil
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Jay Nierenberg
- Dialogue Editor
- Robert Troy
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- Kimberly Lowe Voigt
- Voices:
- Ann Devaney
- Coby McLaughlin
- Bevin McNamara
- Gabriel Williams
- Children's Voices:
- Haviland Miller Cooper
- Rachel Trombetta
- Recordist:
- Sejoon Kahng
- Mixers:
- Derek Marcil
- Karen Roulo
- Foley
- Mixer:
- Josh Schneider
- Animals
- Brian McMillan's Animal Rentals Unlimited
- Trainers
- Eddie Moreno Soto
- Nicole Zuehl
- Cast
- Mark Polish
- Blake Falls
- Michael Polish
- Francis Falls
- Michele Hicks
- Penny
- Jon Gries
- Jay Harrison
- Patrick Bauchau
- Miles
- Garrett Morris
- Jesus
- William Katt
- surgeon
- Lesley Ann Warren
- Francine
- Teresa Hill
- Sissy
- Robert Beecher
- D'Walt
- Jill Andre
- waitress
- Ant
- Tre
- Holly Woodlawn
- flamboyant at party
- Sasha Alexander
- Miss America
- Socorra Mora
- Guadelupe
- Mary-Pat Green
- nurse
- Patty Maloney
- June
- Nellie
- elephant
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Downtown Pictures
- 9,924 feet
- 110 minutes 16 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe