This was my free movie from Alamo Drafthouse for 2018. It was worth the drive down to the South Lamar location.
Anybody over forty-ish may remember the core story about these guys since they were all over the talk-show circuit in the early Eighties (Donohue, Today, Good Morning America, etc) and People magazine. Personally, I have no recollection. I was totally absorbed with being a kid, playing D&D, trying to adjust to life in Houston and watching MTV. I’m going to work on the assumption their story is new because it was for me.
The short version is Eddy, David and Robert rediscovered each completely by accident when they were 19. Their birth mother was a teenager with an unplanned pregnancy so she gave them up for adoption. When they were about six months old, the agency broke them up and each was raised by different families in the New York City area. Initially they’re just overjoyed to find each other. Then comes the media circus in which they reveal in interviews how much they have in common despite being apart:
- They smoke the same brand of cigarettes
- They were wrestlers in high school
- They have sisters who are two years older
- They have similar tastes in women
The triplets use their newfound celebrity status to party in their early twenties, have a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan and eventually go into business together, a high-end steak restaurant called Triplets.
Meanwhile, their parents confront the adoption agency since they were all willing to take in all three together. They get bamboozled by the board and its lawyers so they leave feeling defeated, but one parent re-entered the meeting room when he realized he forgot his umbrella. He caught the board toasting themselves with champagne as if they were celebrating how they just dodged a bullet. This prompts the parents to sue the agency. Oddly, no lawyers will take their case due to the agency’s speciality in adoptions for Jewish families and somehow every firm they speak with has an employee that would have a conflict of interest. Personally, I’m puzzled here. These parents couldn’t find a group of exclusively gentile lawyers?
As Eddy, David and Robert get older, married and wiser…they start to connect the dots too. Some matters they thought were coincidences may have been calculated by a prestigious psychiatrist named Peter B Neubauer who specialized in the “nature v. nurture” debate. Turns out, they weren’t the only children broken up for his study, a set of twins found each other with eerie similarities:
- Researchers from the agency would come by every six months to run tests on the adopted children.
- One was adopted by a working-class immigrant family (shopkeep), one by a middle-class family (teacher) and one by an affluent family (doctor).
The filmmakers do manage to interview a couple people tied to Neubauer’s work. One became a professor in Michigan and the other I’m not clear on yet she hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. Both are rather cavalier on what they did in my opinion; they dismiss it as the attitude of the era. In the end, Neubauer’s study and its conclusions are locked up with Yale until 2066.
At this point, if I’ve piqued your curiosity, see the movie. The revelation of Eddy, David and Robert being guinea pigs isn’t a spoiler. There’s no way in hell coincidence was involved when their story began and there really wouldn’t be much of a movie if it did. For those of you who know what happened later, keep it to yourself and still check it out. Strangers is an excellent documentary.
Alamo Extras: Trailers for the Kung Fu movie Dynamite Trio and Triple Impact; UK newsreels showing roller skaters doing tricks, three tap dancers and three acrobats; the German band Trio performing on Japanese TV; the Danny Lipton Trio Dancers; the Del Rubio Triplets performing on Pee Wee’s Playhouse; and a commercial for Eddy, David and Robert’s Triplets steak house.