Mark Reviews Movies: THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2018

This is an emotional ride of a documentary—beginning with joy, bending toward outrage, twisting into heartbreak, and finishing with a kind of bittersweet hope. Three Identical Strangers tells the true story of identical triplets who were separated shortly after birth, had no idea that they were a biological trio, and were reunited 19 years later by pure coincidence. It's the sort of feel-good story that everyone loves to hear, and everyone did loving hearing about it when the story was happening. Director Tim Wardle examines the strange and infuriating truth beneath the surface of that cheerful, media-friendly tale—the stuff that didn't catch nearly as much public attention.

The basics of this story should be familiar to anyone who was paying attention to the news in the early to middle 1980s. The trio of Robert Shafran, David Kellman, and Eddy Galland became a minor phenomenon during that period, after the newspapers picked up on the happy coincidence that led to their reunion.

Robert arrived for his freshman year at New York state community college, and somehow, people recognized him. Almost 40 years later, Robert still tells this story as if it happened yesterday. Other students waved and greeted him. Some guys slapped him on the back, and a couple of women kissed him. Eventually, some people started to refer to him as "Eddy," and as he was settling into his dorm room, a guy ran in to take a look at him. This guy was Eddy's friend, and he knew that Eddy wasn't coming back to school. Sure enough, though, there was Eddy's double, standing in front of him.

The film captures the thrill of this revelation, recreating the frantic phone call and the rush to Robert's beat-up car, and the joy that eventually came after an hours-long car ride to Eddy's home. The twins, as the two young men believed they were at the time, were brought together again, after spending their entire conscious lives being unaware of each other's existence.

A local reporter caught wind of the story, and that brought David into the mix. He saw the article and a picture of two men, of his age and with copies of his face, staring back at him. A set of twins was one thing. A set of triplets, though, gets you an onslaught of requests for media appearances, and the brothers were everywhere—in the papers, on daytime talk shows, making cameo appearances in a movie.

On TV, the hosts point out to the audience how similar their mannerisms are, and the brothers love emphasizing those similarities—finishing each other's sentences and moving simultaneously—and pointing out the less obvious ones—how each of their adopted families just happened to have an older sister of the same age and their shared taste in certain types of women, for example. The rush of all of this is tangible, from the unlikely fame, to the partying at New York City clubs, to the triplets moving in together, and to the sudden feeling of being part of something greater than yourself—a family that they never knew.

Wardle makes it easy to fall in love with the idea of this situation, even as we start to note some cracks in the surface. For one thing, Robert and David are interviewed separately, and there's the noted absence of Eddy from the documentary's collection of interview subjects, most of them friends and family members. Some other voices are notably absent, too. What became of the triplets' biological parents? They met their birth mother, but nothing came of that reunion.

The hints of something darker are present almost from the start. If one knows nothing about or only knows the beginning of this story, the film's revelations of the truth behind the triplets' separation, adoption by families of three distinct socioeconomic classes within close proximity of each other, and shared stories of strange visitors in each of their childhoods are staggering.

To reveal too much would be unfair, even though the story has been out in the public for about a decade now. It became news, too, but as with so many stories, it's much easier to sell the smiling faces than it is to stick around and find out what became of those faces. The truth behind the triplets' situation involves an adoption agency, a well-renowned Jewish foundation, and a notable psychiatrist. It didn't simply affect their lives. There are countless others, mostly twins, some who have discovered each other and others who might not even know they are twins.

The film tells this side of the story with a precise and scathing sense of righteous outrage, and every new detail comes as shock. What at first seemed like coincidences were actually a sort of intentional form of social staging, and there is no one alive, apparently, who's able or willing to explain what the point of these situations actually was.

The key to the film's impact, though, doesn't come from the esoteric hypotheses of how such a situation might affect people. It doesn't come from the debate surrounding what truly makes a person: their biological nature or their environmental nurturing. It comes from seeing Robert and David on screen, separated at first and then reunited yet again, as they tell their stories of joy and heartbreak and anger. It's in seeing how such a happy reunion turned into bickering, which resulted in another separation. While the three men might be brothers, they were never afforded the opportunity to learn how to be fraternal. They weren't granted the decency of knowing what kind of possibly heritable issues with which they might have to deal, either—information that might have saved a few lives here.

Three Identical Strangers tells a unique and troubling story with an abundance of humanity. Wardle's focus is always on the people involved, and that grants it some direct answers that no psychiatrist, no team of researchers, and no sealed documents could reveal in a satisfactory way.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray