A FINE WIFE: A Raw Story Of A Family Torn Apart By Mental Illness

Randall White chronicled his thirteen year whirlwind romance with the love of his life, Michelle White in his documentary, A Fine Wife. They were in love, happy and had a child. Everything was going right and their futures were looking bright. But when an undiagnosed mental illness took over Michelle’s brain, it destroyed their lives. This is Michelle’s story as much as it is Randall’s and their daughter, Charlotte’s; the antagonist, the protagonist and the innocent bystander.

A Fine Wife is the story of a family; husband, wife and child. What makes this film so relatable is that these are real people, not paid actors. They’re regular Americans and chances are you probably know or knew someone a lot like them in your own life. They could have been your coworkers, your neighbors, your classmates, your friends, maybe even you, yourself – and that was enough to draw me in and capture my interest. I don’t know these people, but I know these people. This film is loaded with behind the scenes moments of real life. Randall White gives us a raw inside look at mental illness from the point of view of a loving mate who is struggling to win a battle against his partner’s demons.

The film opens with a viewer discretion disclaimer because of the subject matter and adult themes of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and beyond into mental illness, addiction and suicide. In the beginning of the film, Randall lets us know this isn’t a Hollywood story with a happy ending. He starts off by acknowledging the biggest truth we all know that Hollywood aims to distract us from; suffering happens.

First Comes Love

After a brief recap of who they were before they met, Randall tells the story of the night he met Michelle and recalls the set of words she would utter that night that would go on to define the rest of his life: “I have to warn you, I come from a crazy family.” At the time he didn’t understand the gravity of her words; that would come later. They explored the west coast and discovered places that would become sacred to them as they fell more and more in love with each other.

They loved hard and lived fast, fully immersed in the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle. Randall was the frontman of a band called Railer. After Randall blew their shot at a major label deal, he and Michelle decided to shift their focus and set their sights on other career paths. Michelle graduated nursing school, at the top of her class and earned herself the Dean’s Award. Randall worked in computers and technology.

After the newlyweds bought a house and Michelle’s mother came for a visit, the home video footage shows a conversation between mother and daughter about how progressive Oregon is because they had legalized marijuana and assisted suicide (the Death with Dignity Act was passed in Oregon in 1997). The conversation veers towards how if you want to die, you should be able to and with your families blessing. Randall’s voiceover notes that those were the days when he still joked about suicide, inferring that people who haven’t experienced suicide loss might make jokes about it and see no harm in it but someone who has experienced suicide loss no longer finds humor in those types of jokes, even in jest. 

Pictures and video footage of Randall and Michelle flood the screen and it’s apparent how deeply in love they both were; they had found “the one”. At this point in the film, I almost wish I didn’t know how their story ended because I wanted to root for them to make it through the tough times. This is a couple that was cheated out of growing old together and the love in their eyes expresses that.

Then The Thunderstorms Rolled In

Randall’s older brother who was a mechanic in the air force took his own life, which unfortunately isn’t uncommon for military personnel. He acknowledges that this is the first of several family suicides and that his brother’s death changed him. But to deal with the pain of it, they decided to “dance the pain away”. One night after partying, they were in a car accident that left Michelle with chronic neck pain which began a spiral into addictive pain medication.

After she weaned off a lot of the medication, they decided to have a baby. His band wasn’t thrilled with the news of his growing family, but then again they also weren’t supportive of his marriage from the get-go, with one band member expressing his condolences instead of congratulations in their wedding video. In the footage of Michelle with their daughter, she looks the happiest than she appears anywhere else in the film. She looked to be truly in love with her husband and child. But her joy was soon to be shattered.

Shortly after their daughter Charolette was born, Michelle’s mother took her life which completely devastated Michelle. A day after her mother died, she called her dad to tell him the news. He responded by telling Michelle that if she didn’t help him out of where he was at that he would also kill himself. This sent her into one of her deepest depressions. Randall ended up bringing his father-in-law in to live with them to try to help lift his wife’s spirits but it didn’t take long before he had found their medication and started taking their pills to feed his addiction.

And then Michelle’s depression flipped from depression to mania. Suddenly, she wanted an open marriage with sexual freedom and although the idea didn’t sit well with Randall, sex wasn’t worth throwing his marriage away over, so he justified it. I recall a time in my own marriage when my husband proposed the same situation to me but unlike Randall, I was willing to end the marriage over it and it was an issue that caused a lot of problems in our home. I was familiar with the pit in the stomach feeling that Randall describes and when he talked about it, I felt tinges of it. One of the symptoms of Michelle’s mania was hyper-sexuality.

The Wrecking Ball Of Mental Illness

There were waves of stability and their daughter acted as an anchor for Michelle. There’s footage of Michelle reading with Charolette and there are pictures of mother and daughter exploding with cheer. These are the moments in everyone’s life we get to see. These are the photos people post on their social media accounts and paint a pretty picture of what life is like according to the outside world. But Randall is quick to call out that the stability never lasted for long.

One of Randall’s bandmates shot himself, taking his own life, for reasons only he knew. Now he felt like he lost two brothers to suicide. Around this time, Michelle’s physical pain began causing problems for her that were interfering with her ability to work. She was suicidal again. The footage here  is very symbolic as it shows Michelle on a rollercoaster while Charolette and Randall stand off to the side and are saying bye to her. In real life, she was taking her family on a rollercoaster ride with her mental illness, but at the amusement park they chose to sit out and let her go at it alone.

Over the years, she continued to cycle through depression and mania; add in drug addiction and hyper-sexuality, taking Randall and Charolette along on her crazy rides. Eventually she would come back to a place of stability and sanity but only ever to lose it again when one of her polar extreme behaviors would take over. Her behaviors ended up getting her 86’d for life from a hotel, cost Randall his job, their house – they’d lost everything they had. And yet through it all, even when he is referring to Michelle as a level five tornado, he is still consumed with an overpowering love for the woman. Frustrated as he catches her sleeping with another man and astonished that she felt at ease walking into a stranger’s house, he still tried to reason with her until he felt that his daughter was endangered and then called it quits – not because he didn’t love Michelle, but because he had to protect and do what was best for his little girl.

He bears his soul openly, showing a heartbroken husband and a protective, loyal father all in the same. Through all the chaos swirling in her mind, Randall was the calm in Michelle’s life. This film shows us a snapshot of thirteen years behind-the-scenes in a romance riddled with mental illness and a deep love, so when we come to the end – which is the scene the film opens with – where Randall gets a call from the hospital saying that a decision needs to be made to remove Michelle off life support, we’re right there with them, as if we know them. Although the news of suicide didn’t come as a shock, it stung. This is not how either of them imagined their story would end and you wouldn’t either if you saw the love in their eyes when their story began.

My face was already flooded with tears by the time he read her suicide note that she left behind. She justified her suicide by telling herself (and her daughter) that her mistakes were too numerous, she couldn’t trust her own judgement anymore and she thought she was doing her daughter a favor by removing her chaos from their lives. That’s the thing about mental illness; it robs a person from being able to see any other way to escape the hell their minds have created for them. Instead of seeking help because of the stigma attached to even acknowledging one has a problem, many find it easier to suicide out of their lives. And that’s what makes this film so important. Their story isn’t unique to them, this illness afflicts many Americans.

Down To Technicalities

A Fine Wife visually consists of personal footage from Randall’s home collection and stock footage. It all blends together nicely into a multi-media presentation of real life, in film form.  Most of the footage in this film was filmed by Randall with his phone during his time with Michelle from 2002-2015.

A lot of the audio was recorded with phones and the parts that might be a little hard to hear have  captions on screen so the words can be read if there’s any question to what is being said. That said, considering it was mostly shot by phone or digital camera and not professionally, the audio is mostly clean throughout the film. 

He doesn’t just share his experiences with Michelle and their rollercoaster-romance but Randall also explains what bipolar disorder is; in the beginning of the film, before getting into their story, when he outlines the three states a bipolar or manic – depressive person cycles through – depression, stability and mania, briefly describing the states. Again towards the end, he recaps the signs of the two detrimental states; depression and mania which afflicted his wife and their life the most.

A Fine Wife: Conclusion

This is a film that shares a personal journey as well as does its best to educate people about what bipolar disorder is in layman’s terms that you and me can easily understand and signs we can easily recognize. He explains the mental illness based on his understanding of it. It is clear in the way he speaks about bipolar disorder and in the way he compassionately talks to Michelle, that he did some research on the subject to help himself better understand what his wife was going through.

Sometimes these are exactly the stories people want to watch and need to hear to know that they and their loved ones aren’t alone in these struggles. Every now and then we need a glimpse into real life that isn’t edited by Hollywood producers but that shows us the ugly reality too many of us would like to deny. Conversations need to be started on the subjects regarding and related to mental health and mental illness. A Fine Wife is an important film and a conversation starter. If you watch this film and recognize bits of your own or a loved one’s behavior in Michelle, know that bipolar disorder is treatable and it’s never too late to get help.

Do you or someone you know live with bipolar disorder? If so, do you relate to Michelle and Randall’s story? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

A Fine Wife is currently being submitted to film festivals. A pre-release version of a Director’s Cut of the film is available at: www.AFineWife.com