Broken Diamonds: Like The Odd Couple, but with schizophrenia

By Liam Lacey

 Rating: C 

An indie American dramedy about the often uncomfortable fit between family and mental health, Broken Diamonds comes at a timely moment for young adult audiences. 

Singer-actor Ben Platt (Pitch Perfect, Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen) stars as Scott, a prickly young waiter whose literary ambitions are derailed when he’s obliged to care for his mentally unwell older sister, Cindy (Lola Kirke). 

We first meet Scott at his going away party at the restaurant where he works, before he heads off to Paris to become a writer, (like Ernest Hemingway, a century ago.)  On his way home, he gets a phone call from his father’s second wife, “Cookie” (Yvette Nicole Brown), who tells him his dad has died. She’d like him to pick up his sister and bring her to the family home. Cindy comes along for the ride but refuses to get out of the car. 

Ben Platt and Yvette Nicole Brown are siblings wrestling with her mental illness.

Later, Scott drives Cindy back to her room in a psychiatric residence. Vivacious and artistically-inclined, Cindy, a one-time aspiring actress, comes across as no more than creatively eccentric when she suggests having their father’s ashes compressed into a memorial diamond (an actual process) which gives the movie its title, but isn’t developed further.

While the impatient Scott is counting down the days until he can board the plane to Paris, Cindy goes into a meltdown, breaking enough rules that  she’s evicted from her residence.  Scott is obliged to take her in for two weeks before she can find a new placement.  Off her meds, the sister turns into the roommate from hell, disrupting Scott’s life and potential plans by setting fire to his apartment, damaging the car he’s trying to sell and destroying his new passport. 

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

None of this is helped by Platt’s performance, with a petulant eye-roll to every impediment, as if he were the fussbudget Felix of The Odd Couple and Cindy his disaster-prone Oscar. Kirk’s performance is more energetic, though she’s essentially a fun manic rom-com girlfriend, until her condition escalates into yelling-at-strangers cliché.  

Yet, even with a soundtrack weighted toward lugubrious angst, the tone here defaults to the banal (“Your sister didn’t ruin your life, her illness did”) or dubious medical advice. Cindy’s pushy therapist recommends that he should encourage Cindy’s plans to get a job, which leads to a (comic?) series of disastrous job interviews.

Another care worker informs Scott his sister has gone off her medication because the “voices” make her feel “powerful.” Possibly, though a brief Google search of reasons people go off their anti-psychotic meds would reveal a list of more mundane reasons: They don’t believe they’re sick or that the medication is ineffective, they hate the drugs’ side effects, they aren’t well-supervised.

Moments before the credits roll, the film switches to quasi-documentary mode, as cast members sit in a circle with people with psychiatric disorders and family members of patients. The patients and family members share their experiences in ways that have value, even if their main function here is to attempt to legitimize the rest of the film.

Broken Diamonds. Directed by Phillip Satler. Written by Steve Waverly. Starring: Ben Platt and Lola Kirke. Broken Diamonds is available on video on demand and in select theatres on July 23.