In this age of identity, when so many people are obsessed with their ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual selves, Tim Wardle’s documentary Three Identical Strangers hits like a thunderbolt. Wardle tells the incredible true story of three 19-year-old men in New York, all adopted as children and complete strangers to each other, who discovered that they were triplets and had been separated at birth by a prominent Jewish adoption agency. When their story broke in 1980, the young men—Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman—became a media sensation, appearing on numerous TV talk shows and, inevitably, opening a restaurant together. Divided by class and upbringing, yet remarkably similar in their tastes and proclivities, the brothers were like a case study in heredity versus environment.
The study came to light through the detective work of journalist Lawrence Wright, who learned that Neubauer, a professor at New York University and director of the Sigmund Freud archive, had arranged for Louise Wise to place numerous twins with adoptive parents for the purpose of psychiatric study. Only the arrogant ascendance of psychiatry in postwar America—warmly remembered by Neubauer’s former research assistant, Natasha Josefowitz—can account for the researchers’ duplicity. Each of the triplets was placed with a family that had already adopted a girl, so the researchers could study the children’s interaction and the parents’ treatment of them. Even more troubling, the biological mothers had been chosen for their histories of mental illness, so that Neubauer might gauge to what degree environment figured in the children’s mental health and identity formation. “Who’d think that anyone could be evil enough to come up with something like this?” asks Bobby Shafran.
Directed by Tim Wardle. PG-13, 96 min.
