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By Birgit Wolz, Ph.D.
The following movie descriptions are part of the online course on Therapeutic Ethics and the Movies.
Table Of Contents
Antwone Fisher
Basic Instinct
Bliss
Deconstructing Harry
Dressed to Kill
Frances
Girl, Interrupted
Good Will Hunting
House of Games
Grosse Pointe Blank
K-Pax
Mr. Jones
Ordinary People
Prime
Prince of Tides
Stay
What About Bob?
Antwone Fisher
Director: Denzel Washington
Producers: Randa Haines, Todd Black, Denzel Washington
Screenwriter: Antwone Fisher
Cast: Derek Luke, Denzel Washington, Joy Bryant, Salli Richardson, Stephen Snedden
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2002
This movie is based on a true story about Antwone Fisher, an African-American in the U.S. Navy stationed in San Diego, California. He has trouble with his anger and gets into a fistfight with a fellow officer. This outburst is sudden, swift, and virtually unprovoked.
Fisher has to be evaluated and treated by the African-American psychiatrist, Dr. Jerome Davenport. Their first sessions are largely characterized by the patient’s squirming in silence after stating, “you may be able to make me come here but you can’t make me talk,” and Davenport’s tough love.
Toward the end of the fifth session, Antwone finally says, “what do you want me to say?” and Davenport responds, “It’s not what I want you to say, it’s what you want to tell me.” And their conversation continues: “I understand you like to fight.” “That’s the only way some people learn.” “But you pay the price for teaching them.” At this point Antwone begins sharing his story, and the emotional floodgates open. During the subsequent weekly therapy the psychiatrist asks gentle but probing questions, listens compassionately, and helps his patient understand patterns of instilled self-loathing that were established in the days of slavery and have been passed down from generation to generation. Davenport uses an integrative approach that blends psychodynamic, behavioral, interpersonal, and humanistic orientations and bibliotherapy.
During their following weekly sessions, Antwone tells his therapist about his birth father, who died at the hands of a former girlfriend before Antwone was born, and about his widowed mother, who gave birth to him while she was in prison. When his mother did not claim him, he lived in an orphanage for two years and eventually landed in the home of the Tates, a storefront preacher and his wife. His foster family experiences were marked by serious physical and emotional abuse, molestation, and abandonment. Thrown out of the Tate house after standing up to his foster mother, he stayed briefly in a men’s shelter. Then he joined the Navy after a criminal escapade that cost his best friend’s life and nearly his own.
As Antwone’s sessions continue, he falls in love with another young sailor, Cheryl Smolley. He is shy around her, asks Davenport for tips on dating, and struggles with the fact that he is still a virgin.
The psychiatrist urges his patient to return to Cleveland, Ohio, to search for his biological family and find closure. At first Antwone resists, but finally, with Cheryl’s help, he flies back. There he has a confrontation with his abusers, a conversation with the mother who abandoned him, and a reunion with his father’s family. This journey proves fruitful in ways that are both agonizing and liberating.
As Antwone’s wounds start healing, he begins to own the inner strength that had enabled him to weather the storms of the past. He breaks through his defensive shell and emerges as a smart and sensitive young man who writes poetry, draws, and loves his girlfriend.
Basic Instinct
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Producer: Alan Marshall
Screenwriter: Joe Eszterhas
Cast: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1992
Detective Nick Curran and his colleague, Gus Moran, investigate a murder. Nick gets sexually involved with one of the suspects, Catherine Tramell. He is in psychotherapy with police psychologist, Dr. Beth Garner, who had also become his lover. In order to protect Curran, Garner gives Lt. Marty Nilsen access to the therapy notes about Nick.
Nick “Shooter” Curran is a police officer who is trying to cope with the suicide of his wife and recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. He was recently cleared of murder charges after he killed two tourists during a drug bust. Curran is in psychotherapy with Dr. Garner, who had also become his lover. Their romance has passed and Beth is trying to win Nick back.
Nick Curran’s already complicated and stormy life magnifies in intensity when he meets Catherine Tramell. She was the girlfriend of a former rock and roll star who was found brutally murdered with an ice pick in his apartment during a night of sex and drugs. Because Tramell was the last person who had seen the murder victim and doesn’t have an alibi, she is high on the list of suspects. The problem is that she wrote a novel, several years prior to this event, in which a man was murdered in just such a way. Is Catherine a psychopathic murderess or did a copycat killer try to frame her?
To get inspired for her murder mysteries, Catherine seduces prototypes for her characters. Her next book is titled “Shooter,” she tells Curran. It will be about a police detective who falls in love with the wrong woman. As Nick investigates the murder, he must spend time interrogating Catherine and becomes entranced. His therapist, Beth, and his colleague and friend, Gus, attempt to warn Nick of the danger, but he pushes them off as jealous or unknowing. As Catherine and Nick get more involved with each other, she alienates him from his friends. His love for Catherine places him in a position in which she can do as she pleases with him, while she writes the ending to her new book.
As the plot thickens, other women, including Nick’s therapist, Beth, become murder suspects. Only the very last shot of this thriller reveals which character was the killer.
Bliss
Director: Lance Young
Producer: Allyn Steward
Screenwriter: Lance Young
Cast: Craig Sheffer, Sheryl Lee, Terence Stamp, Spalding Gray, Casey Siemaszko
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1997
Maria and Joseph see Alfred for couples therapy, while Maria secretly consults sex therapist Dr. Baltazar Vincenza. The latter therapeutic relationship ends when Baltazar starts teaching Joseph “the ways of love.”
Bliss tells the story of Maria and Joseph, who are in love with each other, but bring to their marriage problems that prevent them from having a fulfilling sex life. On their wedding day, they are both apprehensive about getting married. Within six months, they seek help from a psychotherapist, Alfred, who uses a traditional therapeutic approach. During these sessions Maria admits that she fakes her orgasms when she makes love with her husband. Joseph reveals that he never masturbates.
Soon after these revelations, Joseph finds out that Maria attends secret sessions with a sex therapist named Dr. Baltazar Vincenza. He follows her to Baltazar’s office and listens to her excited sexual moans through a half-open door.
Alfred tells Joseph during their following couples therapy session that Baltazar “practices at the edge of the law” and that “they tried to shut him down, but nobody wants to testify against him”. The therapist also explains that Maria suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, that “this disorder is very difficult to heal”, and that “she needs to be re-parented.”
In the following scene, Joseph visits Dr. Vincenza and confronts him angrily. The therapist states that the only way Maria can be helped is to let her act out her sexual abuse.
At home, Joseph finds Maria is caught up in a compulsion as she rids their house of all bugs. He storms into Baltazar’s office at 5:45 in the morning shouting, “The therapy is not working” and “I want you to teach me what you do.” The therapist eventually agrees to teach Joseph the wisdoms of Tantric sex and Eastern philosophies.
Under Baltazar’s guidance, Joseph learns to connect with his heart and to love his body. The therapist also teaches him a nurturing sleeping position and the sexual techniques that he uses with his clients. For example, he says, “The first few times you find the sacred spot, she may be scared. … All Maria’s hurts and psychic abuse lie in this sacred spot.”
When Joseph uses his newly gained knowledge while making love from his heart with his wife, Maria begins regressing back to childhood sexual abuse traumas that hindered her ability to become a fully functional adult. She remembers long-forgotten memories about incest with her father, whom she loved, and consequently convulses and shivers. When her throat closes up, Joseph takes her to a hospital. There, both therapists discuss her case with the physician on staff. They agree that she had a body memory when her throat closed up, which might indicate that she was a victim of infant abuse through oral sex.
Induced by her body memories, Maria sees her father in Joseph and forces him to move out. She fears love because she fears betrayal. Over time she finds healing with the help of support groups and reunites with her husband.
Deconstructing Harry
Director: Woody Allen
Producer: Jean Doumanian
Screenwriter: Woody Allen
Cast: Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, Demi Moore, Robin Williams, Judy Davis, Elisabeth Shue, Kirstie Alley, Bob Balaban, Richard Benjamin, Eric Bogosian, Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Julie Kavner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobey Maguire, Stanley Tucci
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1997
In this dark comedy the hopelessly neurotic, successful novelist, Harry Block, has made his way through six psychoanalysts and three marriages. Harry humiliates and alienates those closest to him by using real events that happened to him and thinly veiled portraits of real-life people as fodder for his confessional-style novels. He faces writer’s block and the impending marriage of his latest flame to a writer friend.
Drowning his growing misery in pills and sex, Harry finds himself invited to receive an award for his writing from a college in upstate New York that had expelled him years ago. The film revolves around Harry trying desperately to find one single friend who will attend the weekend-long symposium with him. But no one wishes to see Harry honored by his alma mater. Because they have all come to loathe him, every person he asks turns him down, each time triggering flash-backs or fictional episodes from his imagination. In one of these episodes his ex-wife, Joan, a psychoanalyst, discovers that Harry has been sleeping with one of her clients.
Eventually Harry hires a hooker, Cookie, kidnaps his son, forces his best friend, Richard (who consequently dies of a heart attack) en route to come along, and heads upstate, where further disaster awaits.
Dressed to Kill
Producer: George Litto
Screenwriter: Brian De Palma
Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1980
The attractive, middle-aged, bored housewife and mother, Kate Miller, visits her Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Elliott, to complain about her unfulfilling erotic life at home. The psychiatrist stares at Kate in a leering manner, leans forward toward her in a seductive way, and tells her that there is nothing wrong with her wanting a satisfying sex life.
After the session, she goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and notices a tall, dark, and handsome stranger. Kate makes eye contact, tries to attract the stranger’s attention by dropping her glove, and then is tracked by the anonymous man through the intricately nested cubes of the museum. This scene ends in an afternoon of satisfying sex.
Later Kate discovers that the anonymous man has a venereal disease, and that she forgot her wedding ring in his apartment. On the way back to her lover’s apartment, a blonde woman murders her brutally with a razor blade in the elevator of the man’s building.
Now the viewer learns that it is up to Detective Marino and Dr. Elliott to figure out who murdered Kate. At the same time, Kate’s teenage son, a techno geek, teams up with a prostitute, Liz Blake, who witnessed the murder, to do an investigation of their own.
Frances
Director: Graeme Clifford
Producer: Jonathan Sanger
Screenwriters: Eric Bergren, Christopher De Vore, Nicholas Kazan
Cast: Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, Sam Shepard, Bart Burns
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1982
The movie portrays the life of actress Frances Farmer (1914-1970), who was a rebel since her teenage years, winning a high school essay award by writing a piece in defense of Communism. Because she is talented and beautiful, Frances makes her way fairly easily into show business. She becomes a movie star, but is determined not to play the Hollywood game. The actress is stubborn and opinionated, fights with the studio system, and defies the bosses. Her defiance attracts the attention of Broadway playwright, Clifford Odets, who convinces Frances to leave Hollywood to play on stage for the Group Theater. After an affair with the dramatist, he abandons her. Frances attempts to restart her movie career. Her disappointments, her increasing dependence on prescription medication and alcohol, and the pressures brought to bear by her mother, Lillian Farmer, result in a mental breakdown.
When Frances refuses to return to Hollywood, her mother orchestrates a series of hospitalizations in a state mental hospital. At her first admission, the actress gets evaluated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Symington. During their first meeting, Dr. Symington patronizes and de-humanizes Frances by making comments about the stresses faced by celebrities, by calling her “a fascinating case,” and telling his patient that he looks forward to solving her predicament. He also pigeon-holes Frances by stating that “creative people act erratically.”
Later Frances is raped by hospital inmates, undergoes shock treatment, and, finally, a lobotomy. Between hospitalizations, Frances is released into the custody of her mother, who persists in browbeating her tortured daughter until the actress discovers the legal means to break away. However, her creative and independent spirit is broken.
Girl, Interrupted
Director: James Mangold
Producers: Cathy Konrad, Douglas Wick
Screenwriters: James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, Anna Hamilton Phelan
Cast: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Clea DuVall, Brittany Murphy, Elizabeth Moss, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Vanessa Redgrave
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1999
After a half-hearted suicide attempt and being evaluated by psychiatrist Dr. Crumble, Susanna Kaysen spends one year at Claymoore. In this psychiatric hospital, she receives treatment from Dr. Melvin Protts and Dr. Sonia Wick, while nurse Valerie looks after her. Susanna befriends the other patients, Lisa, Daisy, Janet, and Georgina.
Girl, Interrupted is based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of committing herself to McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts for “a rest” after attempting suicide and how she was held there for a year-and-a-half.
It is 1967, and 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen recently graduated from high school. Because teen angst has built up inside her, she is confused, insecure, and struggling to make sense of the rapidly changing world around her. Unlike most of her classmates, who are set on what college to go to, Susanna wants nothing more than to write, something that is often scoffed at by those she tells. After a half-hearted suicide attempt, Susanna’s parents, with help from her father’s psychiatrist friend, send her to Claymoore, a private psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, where she is to stay until the doctor believes she is cured. She checks herself in without giving it a thought. Only after signing the admission papers does she learn that she can’t just walk out – the hospital has to release her. So Susanna is stuck for the long haul.
Even though she occasionally hallucinates, the movie argues that people like Susanna can become institutionalized simply because they are already inside the system. There is the assumption that something must be wrong with them. A nurse, Valerie, warns Susanna: “Do not drop anchor here.” But Susanna feels safe and gets absorbed in the cocoon of Claymoore, as if it provides structure and entertainment that she misses on the outside.
First Susanna assumes that she is dissimilar to most of the other residents, but the line between well and sick is blurred when Dr. Pott gives her the diagnoses of Borderline Personality Disorder. Susanna sparks friendships with several of the other girls living there, including Georgina, her timid roommate, who is called a pathological liar; the sweet-natured disfigured Polly, who once lit half of her face on fire in an attempt to get rid of a rash; and the introverted Daisy, who has an eating disorder. Soon after Susanna arrives, Lisa, a long-time patient and lead troublemaker, once again gets caught after she attempts to escape. Because Susanna is at first angry and antisocial, she gravitates naturally toward Lisa.
It becomes increasingly apparent that Claymoore is a discouraging place, because the people with the major problems are some of the staff, not the majority of the patients, many of whom were obviously stuck in the institution to get them out of their wealthy family’s hair. For Susanna, her time in Claymoore represents a period of self-discovery.
Susanna and Lisa run away and travel to stay with Daisy for the night, who was released earlier but is not well enough to be taking care of herself. After a confrontation with Lisa, Daisy hangs herself in the shower.
Seeing the reality of Daisy’s death leads to a transformation for Susanna. She realizes that her rebellion was the result of her inability to acknowledge what she feels and to understand what she wants. Susanna stops fantasizing about suicide. She acknowledges that Lisa’s cruel streak has a vicious edge that she doesn’t want to be associated with any more. So she concentrates on writing in her journal and making a conscious effort to rehabilitate. Susanna finds meaning and direction now and opens up to psychotherapy with Dr. Sonia Wick. She convinces her therapist that she has decided to open up to the world and therefore can learn to be a part of the world. This earns her the right to leave Claymoore. Susanna plans to write and see Dr. Wick for outpatient psychotherapy after her discharge.
Good Will Hunting
Director: Gus Van Sant Jr.
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Screenwriters: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck
Cast: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver, Stellan Skarsgård
Rating: R
Year of Release: 1997
Twenty-year-old Will Hunting works as a janitor at MIT in Boston. He likes to party and hang around the old neighborhood, and his reading consists of downloading the contents of whole libraries into his photographic memory. After a scrape with the law because of his impulse-control problems, he is ordered by the court to see a therapist. Eventually Will is taken under the wings of Lambeau, a professor who had offered a prize to any student who could solve a difficult mathematics problem. But his protégé’s life edges toward self-destruction. Will’s reluctance to embrace the opportunities that Lambeau offers him at MIT is based partly on class and partly on old psychic wounds.
Lambeau finds Will counseling with two different therapists, who decline to work with him after the first session. Eventually Sean McGuire, his former college roommate, now a community college professor, is more successful. Lambeau’s old friend is deeply wounded himself.
Grosse Pointe Blank
Producers: Susan Arnold, Donna Arkoff Roth, Roger Birnbaum
Screenwriters: Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack
Cast: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Joan Cusack, Dan Aykroyd
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1997
After joining the army and spending five years as a covert operative for the CIA, Martin went into business for himself as a professional assassin. As the movie opens, he’s preparing to do a job with a high-powered rifle in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which is his old hometown. This job would conveniently coincide with the weekend of his 10th high school reunion.
However, Martin is no longer happy in his work. He discusses his plight with his psychiatrist, Dr. Oatman, who is alarmed to learn he has a hit man as a patient. Martin lets Oatman know that he is serious about getting therapy. He says, “What a person does for a living doesn’t reflect who he is.” When the psychiatrist gets intimidated and tries to withdraw, his patient complains that Oatman allows the fact that Martin is “a hit man to interfere with our dynamic”. He indirectly threatens his therapist by saying that he knows where the doctor lives. On the advice of the reluctant therapist, Martin agrees to try to patch things up with his high school sweetheart and one true love, Debi Newberry, and attend the event. He states, “I’ll give it a shot.”
While in Grosse Pointe, Martin discovers that Debi still lives in town and holds onto a grudge against him for standing her up on prom night. While Martin tries to sort out his past with his former love, he discovers that he is being shadowed by mysterious types who want to kill him.
House of Games
Director: David Mamet
Producer: Michael Hausman
Screenwriter: David Mamet
Cast: Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, Lilia Skala, J.T. Walsh
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1987
Margaret Ford is a repressed psychiatrist and author of a bestselling book, “Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life.” She specializes in addictive behavior, possibly as a way of dealing with her own compulsions. One of her patients, Billy, is a gambler who fears he will be murdered over a bad debt of $25,000. Margaret feels powerless to help her patient make real changes in his life. Billy is laying a trap for Margaret and she falls right into it.
In her attempt to help her patient and to understand and resolve his gambling addiction, Margaret plunges into a shady nighttime world of con men and bunko artists. She goes to a poolroom called the House of Games, a bar where she wants to talk to the gambler, Mike, who has terrorized her patient over his debt.
She allows this con artist, Mike, to become her guide through this underworld of confidence games and Byzantine stings. He offers her a deal: If she will help him fleece a high-roller Texan in a big-stakes poker game, he will tear up Billy’s marker. She does so. Now the psychiatrist becomes fascinated by the backroom reality of these gamblers who have reduced life to knowledge of the odds. She comes back the next day and tells Mike that she wants to learn more about what kind of man he is and about gamblers and con men in general. By the end of this movie, she has become caught up in the underworld of professional trickery.
K-Pax
Director: Iain Softley
Producers: Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin, Robert F. Colesberry
Screenwriter: Charles Leavitt
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Mary McCormack, Alfre Woodard
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2001
Dr. Mark Powell is intrigued by his new patient, Prot, who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX. In order to evaluate his knowledge in astronomy, the psychiatrist takes his patient to his astronomer friend, Steve Becker, and a group of astrophysicists. Later he brings Prot to a garden party with his wife Rachel, his children, and friends. Powell’s superior, Claudia Villars, does not agree with his approach.
Prot appears out of nowhere in the lobby of New York City’s Grand Central Station. When he sees a woman being mugged, he immediately goes to help her. The police arrive and bring him to a closed ward of the Psychiatric Institute of Manhattan clinic after he tells them that he is from another planet.
At the hospital, a psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Powell, is intrigued by his new patient. Prot, who wears sunglasses to protect his sensitive eyes, claims to be from K-PAX, a planet 1,000 light years away, and a place without families, lawyers, or guidelines for behavior. He has arrived on earth by traveling along beams of light, but at a much higher velocity than light. This “alien” believes that Earth civilization is at an early stage of evolution. He is especially baffled by the human propensity for violence. His purpose here is to document his travels and report back to his planet by a certain date. That date is July 27, 2001. Dr. Powell is determined to somehow get through to his patient before that date. Powell declares Prot to be “the most convincing delusional I’ve ever come across,” while his superior, Claudia Villars, does not have much patience for the psychiatrist’s desire to find the truth about his patient’s background.
Prot has a positive effect on other patients: Howie, who struggles with OCD; Ernie, who is phobic about germs; Sal, who finds everyone’s smell to be offensive; Mrs. Archer, a flamboyant recluse; and Bess, who is locked in her own inner world. When these patients learn that Prot intends to return to K-PAX and that he is going to take only one human with him, each yearns to be the chosen one.
Dr. Powell takes Prot to a planetarium, where he outwits the nation’s leading astrophysicists by demonstrating the orbital path of K-PAX in a distant solar system. After that, Powell invites his patient to a family celebration over the Fourth of July weekend. At the party, Prot psychically communicates with the Powell’s dog, much to the surprise of the children and guests. In a moment alone with Rachel, Powell’s wife, he learns that the good doctor is estranged from his son from his first marriage.
Convinced that Prot experienced a trauma in his past, Dr. Powell intensifies his efforts to uncover the secrets of his patient’s past through hypnosis and some amateur detective work. He finds evidence of Prot’s traumatic history and confronts him with the truth. Prot, on the other hand, confronts Mark Powell with his unresolved family problems.
Prot leaves for K-Pax at the predicted time, but in a different way than everybody expected. When his therapist finds him in his room, it appears as if his soul has left and only his catatonic body stayed behind. Since another patient, Bess, disappeared too, the hospital inmates are convinced that Prot did exactly what he had promised.
Through his work with Prot, Powell experiences his own transformation, which leads to more closeness in his marriage and a reconciliation with his estranged son.
Mr. Jones
Director: Mike Figgis
Cast: Richard Gere, Lena Olin, Anne Bancroft, Tom Irwin
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1993
Mr. Jones is experiencing manic euphoria. He is all-powerful, he is elated, and everything has become clear at last! He starts to walk “tight-rope” style on top of a building stating that he is going to fly off the top of the house and gently land on the street.
After that situation Jones is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and first is misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. For the next couple of scenes he shows what manic episodes look like. Toward the middle of the movie the psychiatrists change his diagnosis to Bipolar Disorder and prescribe lithium. Jones fights against the drugs and against the whole depressing world of normality. He misses his euphoria.
Eventually Mr. Jones comes under the care of and gets romantically involved with a psychiatrist, Dr. Libbie Bowen, who has serious problems in her marriage.
Ordinary People
Director: Robert Redford
Producer: Ronald L. Schwary
Screenwriter: Alvin Sargent
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton, M. Emmet Walsh, Elizabeth McGovern, Dinah Manoff, Fredric Lehne, James Sikking
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1980
The Jareds, an upper-middle-class family, live in a suburban house, which looks like it’s out of Better Homes and Gardens. Their second son, Conrad, is, on the surface, an ordinary teen: a good student, popular, and a member of the swim team. But since he helplessly watched his older brother drown in a boating accident, Conrad dreams furiously, jerking awake bathed in sweat. He blames himself for his brother’s death. The teenager is distracted and unreachable, barely convinced by the virtue of study, a different person to those who used to be his friends.
His father, Calvin, a mild-mannered successful Chicago attorney, can no longer connect with Conrad either and worries about him. His love for his son is sincere, yet also inarticulate and shy. Calvin treats Conrad as if he is a fragile ornament, not to be touched, and Conrad’s mother, Beth, is an embittered, selfish, controlling, but superficially cheerful homemaker whom “everyone loves.” She always loved the dead older son more and has now shut Conrad out of her life completely. Previously the second-born had lived in his brother’s shadow. Calvin tries to mediate between Beth and his son, but cannot bring them together. Conrad suffers from extreme depression and guilt. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt and hospitalization, he has become a semi-outcast at school.
Eventually he agrees to see a psychologist, Dr. Berger. After Conrad states that his purpose for coming to therapy is to gain control over his life, Berger responds, “I’m not big on control.” In order to buffer the impact of this challenging statement, he continues, “But it’s your money, so to speak.” Then the psychologist uses teenage language such as “control is a tough nut.” With this comment, he prepares his client for his plan to have Conrad cancel his swimming practice and see him twice a week because they are working on a difficult problem. The psychologist also demonstrates well how varying distance during therapy can be clinically effective. He wheels his chair far away from the client when he wants to give the adolescent space. A few seconds later, he wheels it up close and confronts the teenager by being “in his face.” When the teenager calls and visits Berger in the middle of the night because his friend committed suicide, the psychologist conducts a session immediately.
Prime
Director: Ben Younger
Producers: Jennifer Todd, Suzanne Todd, Mark Gordon
Screenwriter: Ben Younger
Cast: Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams, Adriana Biasi, David Younger, Aubrey Dollar
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2005
Rafi Gardet dates a younger man, David Bloomberg. After hearing about this relationship in their sessions for some time, her therapist, Dr. Lisa Metzger, finds out that Rafi’s boyfriend is her own son.
Rafi Gardet, a 37-year-old recently divorced and vulnerable woman is reluctant to believe she even deserves to be happy. Against her better judgment she becomes involved with a 23-year-old jobless artist named David Bloomberg, who himself is insecure and confused.
The complications of her romance become the main topic of conversation in her psychotherapy sessions with Dr. Lisa Metzger.Although she lies about David’s age, pretending that he is 27, Rafi tells her therapist that she is worried about the age gap and David’s demanding relationship with his overly protective Jewish mother. Because her client appears increasingly happier as her relationship develops, Metzger encourages her to seize the moment. So Rafi does, and describes in graphic detail their sexual encounters, with Metzger encouraging her with statements like “Enjoy your life … 27, my god, you deserve this”.
And all is well until it dawns on the therapist that the young man in question is actually her own son. Since they have different last names and his age has been lied about, she had no reason to guess this earlier. Especially since she discovered this long after a strong therapeutic bond had developed between the therapist and her client, the therapist is faced with an ethical dilemma.
Lisa Metzger consults her own therapist for advice and is told she needs to focus primarily on her responsibility to her client. So she continues the sessions, during which she hears much more about the intimate aspects of her client and son’s relationship than any of them would choose. Rafi talks about David’s lovemaking, admirable details of his physique, and his opinion of his mother.
At the same time, Lisa’s concerns for her son are the age difference and the different religious backgrounds between him and Rafi. Because the Jewish mom believes that religion is paramount in a person’s life, she urges him strongly to let go of Rafi and marry within his faith. Lisa tells David repeatedly, “Love isn’t always enough when it comes to marriage and kids and all that comes with it.”
The film blends humor with touching gravity. The therapy is terminated with the client feeling betrayed and, subsequently, being received through the “family” door as the girlfriend of the therapist’s son.
Prince of Tides
Director: Barbara Streisand
Producers: Barbara Streisand
Cast: Barbara Streisand, Nick Nolte, Blythe Danner, Kate Nellingan
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1991
Tom, an unemployed, aimless ex-high school football coach from the South, ventures north into New York City to see his twin sister, after she tried to commit suicide again.
In New York, Tom meets his sister’s psychiatrist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, who wants him to shed light on their family life. He reveals a terrible family secret, which lies behind his depression, his brother’s untimely death, and his sister’s suicide attempts. As children they were subjected to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Their ruthlessly ambitious mother first married a violent, alcoholic man. Some time later she traded up to a local rich man whose cruelty was more refined. The children and their mother were also raped by escaped convicts. After Tom’s brother killed the men, his mother insisted that they bury the bodies quickly and never tell anyone. Tom hates his mother, but cannot free himself of her.
Tom was once happily married, but there is no more love in their marriage, maybe because of the pains he feels deep inside. Susan Lowenstein is married to a philandering, snobbish, famous violist who humiliates her with his indiscreet liaisons.
Tom and Susan have a brief love affair that seems to rescue the psychiatrist from her marital misery and help her regain self-respect. Both consider a more permanent arrangement, but part when Tom’s wife asks him to come home to his family.
Stay
Director: Marc Forster
Producers: Tom Lassally, Eric Kopeloff
Screenwriter: David Benioff
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, Bob Hoskins, Kate Burton, Janeane Garofalo
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2005
On the surface the story of Stay tells us about a car wreck on the Brooklyn Bridge, from which Henry Letham, an art student and painter, escapes. It proceeds to Henry’s first session with the university psychiatrist, Sam Foster, who substitutes for his colleague, Dr. Beth Levy. Letham is angered by the substitution and walks out. He returns on another day and announces that he will commit suicide at midnight on Saturday.
The psychiatrist wants to save Henry, and tries to do everything to figure out why and where his patient wants to kill himself in order to prevent the suicide. Like a detective, Sam Foster visits and questions Dr. Levy, Henry’s mother, and his patient’s object of affection, an actress and waitress named Athena. Foster also finds out that his patient believes that he has done an unforgivable thing and consequently does not deserve to live. Throughout the movie, the psychiatrist discusses his worries with his live-in girlfriend, Lila, who is an artist. too, and was one of his former patients. After she slit her wrists, Sam found her in a bloody bathtub, just in time to prevent her death.
The film’s ending and many clues throughout the movie suggest an explanation that deviates from this surface plot. What seems to be happening to the characters may not be happening at all, except in Henry’s feverish mind as he is dying after his car accident. At one point, a character exclaims that the Buddhists have it right: “The world is an illusion!” A therapist viewer might be relieved that Foster violated many therapeutic boundaries only in an illusionary world.
What About Bob?
Director: Frank Oz
Producers: Laura Ziskin, Bernard Williams
Screenwriter: Tom Schulman
Cast: Bill Murray, Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty, Charlie Korsmo, Kathryn Erbe
MPAA Rating: PG
Year of Release: 1991
After one therapy session, Bob Wiley follows his psychiatrist, Dr. Leo Marvin, to his lakeside summer home in order to further discuss his problems. There, Bob befriends Marvin’s son Sigmund, daughter Anna, and wife Fay.
The New Yorker, Bob Wiley, is struggling with a whirlwind of paralyzing phobias. He has consulted many therapists for help and has a habit of clinging to them. His latest analyst, the exasperated Dr. Carswell Fensterwald, refers him to Dr. Leo Marvin, who sees Bob for his last appointment before he travels to New Hampshire on a month’s vacation. After having just one session, Bob thinks the world of Dr. Marvin. The psychiatrist diagnoses Wiley with “multi-phobic personality, characterized by acute separation anxiety and extreme need for family connections.”
Bob takes to Dr. Marvin’s latest book, Baby Steps. But the doctor’s vacation throws him into utter despair. He calls Marvin constantly, demanding to see him, but the psychiatrist says he is on vacation and cuts his patient off. Because he feels abandoned by the therapist who seemed so promising to him, Wiley manages to track him down at his lakeside summer home for further treatment. But Marvin, preparing for an interview about his best-selling self-help book on “Good Morning America,” demands he return to New York. Bob sets up camp with a neighbor, following his therapist’s advice to take his own “vacation” from his problems.
Meanwhile, the psychiatrist’s son Sigmund, daughter Anna (named after Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna), and wife Fay, enjoy Bob’s charm, which the up-tight and narcissistic Leo Marvin views as a threat to his role in the family. Because Leo wants to please his wife, he is completely unsuccessful in setting appropriate boundaries with his patient. Consequently, the psychiatrist becomes increasingly unhinged as the minutes tick down to the interview.
Wiley surprisingly overcomes several of his phobias. Because he believes that Marvin made it possible for him to come out of his shell, he is extremely grateful and wants to show his gratitude. A comedy of errors follows that drives Leo literally crazy.