On the couch

Shrink
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Directed by: Jonas Pate
Starring: Kevin Spacey; Mark
Webber; Keke Palmer; Saffron Burrows; Robin Williams

Shrink – Jonas Pate’s tale of a Hollywood psychologist whose life is spiralling out of control worse than his patients’ – is an odd sort of a flick.

Starring Kevin Spacey as Dr Henry Carter, an internationally celebrated shrink in a the Dr Phil mode, it is similar in some ways  to the Robert De Niro-starring What just Happened? – a massively successful actor taking on a small, very Hollywood-centric flick for what can only be described as, “the craic”.
Where What just Happened? dealt with the film business specifically, Shrink takes its shots at the film industry more tangentially and, for the most part, less successfully.
Dr Carter is having a nervous breakdown in slow motion. In between sessions with Shamus (Jack Huston) a drink and drug addled Colin Farrell-like actor and Jemma (Keke Palmer), a young woman coping poorly with her mother’s death, he spends his time getting very, very stoned, falling asleep on his garden bench and generally avoiding the emotional aftermath of his wife killing herself. He also finds time to spurn an intervention by his friends and family.
Spacey’s is the strong back that holds this film. Without his central performance it is, at best, a run-of-the-mill effort with a far better cast than its loose, sloppy story deserves.
He is not alone in his endeavours, however, with an unusually subdued Robin Williams as an aging action movie star struggling with alcoholism and sex addiction and Dallas Roberts as a powerful agent riddled with anxiety and neuroses adding impressive performance of their own.
The relationship between Carter, Jemma and Jeremy (Mark Webber) is the film’s most interesting, however and provides what little actual story arc the film has.
Jeremy, a frustrated screenwriter is vaguely related to the good doctor and, at times, his good friend and patient. An act of desperation and betrayal on his behalf sees him strike up an awkward relationship with Jemma and eventually bring the story to some sort of a conclusion.
There’s a string of interesting, entertaining scenes tied together with nothing that would make you care.
In the end though, Spacey’s character just comes across as a less well written, less nuanced Lester Burnham and the film as a whole could’ve been retitled American Beauty 90210.
The idea of an otherwise successful man imploding under the weight of his life is a well-explored theme for Spacey but he has been better served in other roles. Despite this, he still manages to make Dr Carter an interesting character to watch.
Shrink either has too much story or not enough. The patient-friend-father/mentor relationship between Spacey, Webber and Palmer is interesting but forced to give up time to other plot threads. Unfortunately, the other stories the film tries to weave together are insubstantial and barely a distraction.
If the focus had stayed on the three or had opened itself everyone, a la Dazed and Confused for example, things might’ve been different.
Unlike any of Richard Linklater’s character-driven wanderfests  which can entrall an audience without providing too much of a plot, Shrink lacks the style and charm to just float along on the strength of its own characters.
Which is a pity because there was room here to do so much more with a good cast wasted.