REVIEW: Halle Berry Has a Personality Crisis in Frankie and Alice

Based on events that occurred in the 1970s and stuck in a "women in trouble" time machine set to 1958, Frankie and Alice builds a hothouse frame around the story of a Los Angeles woman whose multiple personalities are funking up her life. A psychiatric procedural directed by Geoffrey Sax, Frankie and Alice also answers the question of how many screenwriters, in 2010, it takes to come up with a line like, "He's so fine I'd f--- him for free!"

Six. It takes six. As many dubiously scripted strippers surround Frankie (Halle Berry) at her place of work, a peeler bar in the bad part of town. Sax opens on Halle in a cage, dancing badly and teasing regulars with that old stripper trick: doubling up on panties. This is Berry in too-legit mode: Rolling around in a glistening afro and hoochie hot pants, she macks on the DJ and finishes crossword puzzles. Our magical sex worker is special, of course, but how special?

We find out when her rendezvous with that DJ gets freaky: A stray toy sets her off, and within moments she's a bible-quoting diva with a mean right arm. It's a little like watching Foxy Brown turn into Scarlett O'Hara, who then regresses further into the demonstrative swans and cowers of silent-movie queens. For if Frankie contains a multitude of personalities (or three, to be exact), Berry cannot resist the urge to turn her into an opportunity to rifle through the back catalog of screen personas and iconic performances. Frankie's struggle strays close to camp during her first transition; by the climax, which finds her cycling through personalities so quickly one fears for an emotive sprain, the story is secondary to the spectacle of Berry writhing with Oscar fever.

Tasked with making her whole again and accepting redemption in turn is Dr. Oz -- not that Dr. Oz, thank God, but one played with doting distraction by Stellan Skarsgård. He's a psychiatrist who seems to have lost his nerve for clinical care -- a marriage crack-up might have something to do with that -- but he agrees to treat Frankie the second time she's hauled into the hospital for a post-assault evaluation. We learn about her past in fits and starts, a process hindered by her tendency to begin speaking in the voice of either an imperious Southern belle or a lispy 12-year-old who happens to be a genius. We are told each version of Frankie varies in things like I.Q., dominant hand and blood pressure, but the methodology behind her treatment doesn't go beyond "follow the light" hypnosis and time logged on the old leather couch.

Sax makes some smooth moves during these sessions, however, finding a kind of stylistic phrasing that suggests not just flashbacks but someone actually living through a memory. It's a welcome aesthetic reprieve from the otherwise rote assortment of nuthouse staple scenes: Frankie has a code-green freak-out when a triggering song plays; Frankie gets the drooling natives dancing when Soul Train comes on TV. It's an approach that suffers the more for arriving in the wake of a show like The United States of Tara, which manages to bring a level of believability, humor and pathos to its portrayal of the experience of living with a severe dissociative disorder.

With the aid of mild sedatives and Skarsgård's soothing accent, Frankie recovers the memories that she has been repressing, and which have fractured her identity in three. They are racial, romantic and maternal in origin (Phylicia Rashad appears as her mother), but the deep-dish stuff is barely touched upon before Dr. Oz's hour is up, and a bromidic prescription stands in for an epiphany, or even a proper ending.