“Shrink” begins with a man waking on a couch.
No, it’s not a particularly subtle gesture in a movie about a psychiatrist who flounders after tragic personal loss.
But as the interlocking stories about a group of Angelinos take shape, Dr. Henry Carter’s resistance to his own bed in his Hollywood Hills home deepens in meaning.
One of the pitfalls of this ensemble-driven drama, starring Kevin Spacey as Carter, is that so much of it seems familiar, the more nuanced insights get lost. But they’re here, and they tug.
“Doctor, heal thyself” may be the saying. Carter, though, has settled on the less noble “self-medicate thyself.” He alternately smokes cigarettes and weed. His exchanges with marijuana dealer Jesus (Jesse Plemons of “Friday Night Lights”) have the feel of couch sessions.
Carter is not without genuine concern. He pleads “compassion fatigue.” Meeting his clients could tire anyone.
High-powered agent Patrick (Dallas Roberts) is an over-the-top achiever with a bundle of obsessive-compulsive traits and a nasty temper. Saffron Burrows is Kate, an aging star (by La La Land standards) married to a regressing rocker. Robin Williams plays a actor who would much prefer a sex-addiction diagnosis. Alas, he’s just an alcoholic.
Rounding out this roundelay of disordered personalities are Shamus (Jack Huston), a substance-imbibing Australian actor who’d like to be taken seriously; Jeremy (Mark Webber), a struggling screenwriter who was once Carter’s client and, he thinks, friend; and Daisy, agent Patrick’s pregnant and overworked assistant (Pell James, turning in an impressively different turn from her bad-girl role in “Surveillance”).
One role that we haven’t seen before offers a good reason (in addition to Spacey’s finely calibrated turn) to seek out “Shrink.” Jemma (Keke Palmer) is an African-American student starting to falter at private school. Carter’s psychiatrist father sends her to his son in hopes of re-engaging the wounded doctor.
The young actress has grown up since debuting as the avid young speller in “Akeelah and the Bee.”
Here, she gives a quietly pent-up performance as a woman/child enamored of movies and angry at everything else and everyone else.
Directed by Jonas Pate and written with a nice ear for self-delusion by Thomas Moffet, “Shrink” mixes cliches with some pleasant surprises.
But the ensemble approach (“Crash,” “Crossing Over”) is beginning to seem like a narrative tic.
Is there an intervention for that?
“SHRINK.”
R for drug content throughout, and pervasive language including some sexual references. 1 hour, 44 minutes. Directed by Jonas Pate; written by Thomas Moffett; photography by Lukas Ettlin; starring Kevin Spacey, Robert Loggia, Pell James, Keke Palmer, Saffron Burrows, Jack Huston, Dallas Roberts, Gore Vidal, Laura Ramsey, Mark Webber, Jesse Plemons. Opens today at the Regency Tamarac Square.
