Pubdate: Fri, 27 Nov 2020
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2020 The New York Times Company
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/movies/my-psychedelic-love-story-review.html
Author: Glenn Kenny

ACID AND ROMANCE

To induce dread in a paranoiac, one need only invoke two acronyms:
C.I.A. and LSD Along with a third and a fourth - U.F.O. and J.F.K. -
these were key ingredients in the alphabet soup of conspiracy theory
for more than half a century.

But. You don't have to be a paranoiac, because sometimes
dread-inducing combinations and schemes do yield horrific results. The
2017 Errol Morris-directed mini-series, "Wormwood," to which "My
Psychedelic Love Story" is a sequel of sorts, went into detail about
the C.I.A. and LSD. It showed that the cloak-and-dagger organization
and the hallucinogenic drug met up earlier than most might have guessed.

The agency's early experimentation with acid culminated in 1952 with
the tragic, infuriating death of the C.I.A.-employed scientist Frank
Olson, officially deemed a suicide. "Wormwood" mixed Morris's astute
documentary style - a blend of acute interviews, archival footage and
graphics - with dramatic re-enactments to suggest that it might have
been murder.

The mini-series caught the attention of Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who in
the early '70s was the consort and psychic soul mate of Timothy Leary,
the Harvard psychology professor turned LSD Johnny Appleseed.
Harcourt-Smith was in Afghanistan with Leary, who had escaped from
prison in the United States, when he was returned to U.S. custody.

At a subsequent rally for Leary, the poet and activist Allen Ginsberg,
in a piece called "44 Questions About Timothy Leary," asked, with not
a little anger, whether Harcourt-Smith was a "C.I.A. sex provocateur"
who entrapped Leary.

Harcourt-Smith's question for Morris is: "Was I?"

"My Psychedelic Love Story" also draws on her 2013 memoir
"Tripping the Bardo With Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story."
The narrative Morris and Harcourt-Smith recount is rollicking,
globe-trotting and packed with characters, including the shady
Hungarian banker Arpad Plesch - who managed to make himself
Harcourt-Smith's step-grandfather and stepfather - and the Rolling
Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Implausible but nevertheless actual
names such as Donald Strange are dropped. If you ever wondered,
"How does Thomas Pynchon come up with that stuff?" this movie
will assure you that the world just hands a lot of it to him.

Throughout the movie, Harcourt-Smith, a handsome woman sitting
comfortably on an aqua love seat in an airy, earth-toned living room,
recounts tales of free love interspersed with recollections of
childhood sexual abuse. She likens herself to Mata Hari (and Morris
frequently intercuts Greta Garbo, in a 1931 film, vamping it up as the
famous spy). She shares wisdom from her bohemian upbringing with
observations such as "You can never tell how rich rich people are."

Morris asks her point blank, "When did you first realize you could
control men?" and she takes the question at face value. But her story
reveals that idea of control, as Morris frames it, is a false one.

It is true, though, that for a long period Leary was in thrall to
Harcourt-Smith, and that Harcourt-Smith worshiped him. This heady,
fascinating movie never definitively establishes that she was
manipulated to get Leary back into the United States, where he
eventually became an informant.

And as is the case so many times in life, the relationship between
Leary and Harcourt-Smith ended, after all the convolutions and
mystifications, not with a bang or even a whimper, but a simple
betrayal. One night, while living in witness protection in Santa Fe,
N.M. ("I wasn't used to camping," Harcourt-Smith says of their raw
living quarters; "I was a Parisian!") the couple had a loud argument.
The next morning Leary was gone from the house, and from her
life forever.