Brotherly bonds: love will never tear them apart

COURTESY YORK SQUARE CINEMAS STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: Michael and Mark Polish form a somber constellation in their 'Twin Falls Idaho'.

The premise of Twin Falls Idaho makes most people laugh when they first hear it. It's a love triangle between a prostitute and a pair of Siamese twins. One twin loves the girl who eventually grows to love him back. The other is seriously ill and jealous over his brother's newfound companion. It sounds like it could be Charles Addams' take on modern romance.

Fortunately, the film never allows itself to sink into the potential campiness of its premise. Real-life twins Michael and Mark Polish, who directed and wrote the film, respectively, play the roles of the conjoined twins Francis and Blake Falls. On their birthday they order Penny, a waifish prostitute played by Michele Hicks, as a gift to themselves. Like most people who encounter the twins, Penny takes one look at them and bolts for the door, but has to return later for her forgotten purse. It's then that she begins to see the beautiful but tragic relationship between the brothers.

They share everything: the same apartment, the same clothes, the same blood, and some of the same internal organs. The fiercely independent Penny finds herself drawn to this bizarre marriage of two people and even begins to fall in love with Blake, the more romantic of the brothers (his feelings are first hinted at with the poignant line, "I'll call you when I'm single"). Meanwhile, Francis, the more headstrong of the two, becomes more ill. It turns out that his heart is the weaker of the two that they share. Blake literally keeps him alive. Surgery to separate the two would kill Francis and leave Blake with only a grim fifty-fifty chance of survival.

The Polish brothers portray the Falls brothers and their incomprehensibly difficult life together with solemn dignity. There's no doubt that their own experience of being lumped together as one person (and they're as identical as identical twins can be) allowed for an empathy with the characters that would be impossible to achieve for most actors and an attention to small details that shines through everywhere in the script.

The Falls twins help dress each other. Blake holds Francis's head over the toilet bowl when he is sick and even takes medicine for his brother when he's too stubborn to do it himself. On their birthday they have a single cake made of two conspicuously different flavored halves. On top of the cake they light a single candle, blow it out, re-light, and blow it out again so that each may make his own wish.

The saddest detail is the unexpected rendezvous Penny has with the brothers on Halloween—she realizes that this is the one night of the year that they can appear in public and pass as a cleverly costumed duo instead of the freaks they're perceived as the other 364 days a year. These portions of the film help the viewer at least begin to comprehend the idea of physically sharing a body with someone else. It makes us realize that the Falls twins are all things to each other: terminal companion, life-support system, and bane of existence.

Hicks plays the part of Penny, the jaded streetwalker with skillful restraint. Her transition from initial revulsion to curiosity and then finally to a previously dormant maternal instinct is seamless and natural, as it runs parallel to our own feelings towards the twins. When she flirtatiously makes an offer to Blake to paint the toenails of whichever feet belong to him, her expression never changes as he reveals the hidden fourth leg that's been morphed into the shared third leg of the brothers. Instead, she chooses to responds coolly with, "Well, I guess we'll start there."

The film arcs inexorably toward tragedy—the lives of the Falls twins are not happy ones. They are incapable of existing together or alone, yet they're not bitter about their physical deformity; they've accepted it. What bothers them is that no one else can.

I felt a little shell-shocked when the film was over. The movie's theme of total acceptance, of both the self and of others, is in no way an original message, but it is one that has rarely been driven home with such force. Twin Falls Idaho is a well-written, well-acted, and well-crafted rebuttal to every lame-brained movie that told you to laugh at the guy with the extra heads.

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