Story
In the 1960’s, former Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary became
the nation’s primary advocate for use of LSD – a hallucinogenic drug
that was considered an illegal narcotic. With Richard Nixon as
United States president in the late 60’s and early 70’s, he declared a
war on drugs and was determined to make an example out of Leary.
But Leary fled the country and lived in exile in Europe. Unwilling
to return to his home country for fear of being thrown into prison, he
spent his time getting high with his fellow expatriates and writing
about his experiences.
Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a young well-connected woman who lived her own
nonconformist lifestyle, enjoyed a wide variety of lovers – many of them
older men. One such man was a wealthy and influential European
entrepreneur with a somewhat sketchy background. This man claimed
to “own” Leary (i.e. – he got Leary to sign over his literary rights to
him) and was among the things he mentioned to Harcourt-Smith in order to
impress her after she seemed to lose interest in him. Initially,
she wasn’t sure who Leary was – but once she learned of his rebellious
nature, she relished the thought of being with someone who was
considered an outlaw.
Through her connections, Harcourt-Smith got an introduction to Leary,
visiting him at his chalet in Switzerland; she found this charismatic
man to be irresistibly attractive and after he introduced her to LSD
they soon wound up in a serious relationship. Eventually, Leary
would return to America and wound up in the same prison as Charles
Manson. He would be frequently visited by Harcourt-Smith but did
their return spur the CIA to spy on him? Later, when he got out of
prison and agreed to cooperate with the Drug Enforcement Agency, both
Leary and Harcourt-Smith were relocated to New Mexico where they lived
under assumed identities. Their love would be tested and when they
got into an argument one night, Harcourt-Smith awoke the next morning to
find Leary gone and she would never see him again.
Review
On its surface, the story behind these two is an interesting tale – but
you might never know it based on the convoluted fashion director Errol
Morris chooses to tell it to the audience. Part of the problem,
too, has to go to the narrator, Joanna Harcourt-Smith; the film is based
on her book, “Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love
Story”. Hopefully, the book makes better sense than the movie on
which it is based. It is at times rambling and incoherent; certain
stories seem to go in circles making you wonder what parts (if any) may
be true.
As bad form as it may be to speak ill of the dead (she died in October
of this year), Harcourt-Smith is what you might refer to as an
“unreliable narrator”. She can’t seem to say for certain if she
was a Mata Hari embedded with Leary by the CIA in order to do Nixon’s
dirty work. Add to that the fact that she was a hardcore partier
with various celebrities and indulged in a variety of substances during
that period (not the least of which being LSD trips with Leary) and you
might as well be left to make up your own story about these two.
Morris includes plenty of news clips and interviews, but none of the
interviews are relatively recent.
It would appear from the interviews that Harcourt-Smith reached out to Morris after seeing his TV mini-series “Wormwood”, which focuses on some rather dark experiments conducted by The United States government. After seeing these episodes, Harcourt-Smith was slowly convinced that she may have been a mole who was used by the government in order to get the goods on Leary once and for all. Unfortunately, some of her seeming moments of clarity in her memory are betrayed by much clearer memories of her childhood and extensive sex life.
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