When The Shrink Has More Problems Than You Do Where Does He Go

What happens when the people we count on to hold us together...are barely holding it together themselves? Jonas Pate's Shrink is a striking, fast-paced expose of the "other" Hollywood, featuring folks living outside their comfort zone and the people who put them there. A tart, funny, and uplifting drama about the courage it takes to achieve happiness.

I'm starting to wonder about pothead shrinks. Are they a problem in real life? I don't know because I've never actually observed one in nature. Only at the movies have I met the Stoner Therapist — in 2008's The Wackness (which featured Ben Kingsley, long of hair and large of bong) and now Shrink. Bette Midler had a few tokes as Mel Gibson's marriage counselor in What Women Want, but the strung-out, midlife seediness of these latest incarnations marks a new cinematic low for mental-health professionals. These folks aren't just high. They're pathetic. As this new one puffs along, red-rimmed and rambling, we grasp the irrelevancy of his job and the inefficacy of his drug use. Kevin Spacey, always an excellent choice for cynical outsiders, brings a wary defeatism to his role as Henry Carter — a grief-stricken therapist-to-the-stars — that recalls Jack Lemmon's toughest work. Only later did I remember Lemmon's significance to Spacey as mentor and muse; there's a cellular kinship between them, a gift for sharp-edged American despair, that I frankly hadn't noticed before. It's the best thing going in Shrink, an ensemble piece that follows Carter through day-to-day encounters with various lost souls. Many are patients: a Hollywood glamour couple (Saffron Burrows and Joel Gretsch), an alcoholic lech (Robin Williams) and, my favorite, a way-past-neurotic agent who pops his cork with hysterical brio (Dallas Roberts). Also in the mix are a pert assistant (Pell James), a bad-boy A-lister (Jack Huston), a dealer named Jesus (Jesse Plemons) and an aspiring screenwriter (Mark Webber) in need of shampoo.

Henry, the best-selling author of such self-helpful titles as Happiness Now and Stop Feeling Mad, doles out advice with the slackened delivery of a man who's long past caring. His loved ones stage a useless intervention. But then his therapist-dad (Robert Loggia) hooks him up with a pro bono client, a troubled girl (Keke Palmer) with a knack for cutting through bull. If you've seen enough movies (say, Half Nelson), you'll probably guess that the African-American teenager and the drug-addicted white guy will find some common ground.  In the scenes that follow, Kierkegaard gets quoted (“The sufferer must help himself”) and comedy mashes it up with drama, the tone zig-zagging from nippy Hollywood satire to drifting reflections on loss. As Webber's character observes, “Life isn't really one or the other.” Too true, too true. The plot relies heavily on pat betrayal, forced coincidences — and the sort of closure that lands, with a thud, in a tidy package of clichés. Yet some of the humor is delicious. And there are a few fine moments of truth and pathos, most of them addressing a subset of grief often ignored on film. Where the drama succeeds, it succeeds as a portrait of suffering: Had director Jonas Pate and screenwriter Thomas Moffett limited themselves to the bags under Henry's eyes and the emotional hollow behind them, they might have produced a minor classic. As it is, American Beauty remains the singular masterwork of Spacey-in-crisis — and Spacey-on-pot, but he does a good job here also and that's why it works. This gets a 3 on my "Go See" scale.