Shiny Happy People Acting: Jonas Pate’s “Shrink”

Instead “Shrink” sticks to the surface, eagerly appropriating other reliable tropes, from Hollywood broadsides a la “The Player” (the agent and a steadicam tour a debauched party trailed by bon mots like, “They’re lining up nuts to butts to see that”), to “Half Nelson” (druggie shrink Carter tries to counsel Palmer’s Jemma, but instead they’re equals in grief, a visually pleasing pairing of old and young, white and black, bitterness and hope), “Sideways” (despite his downward spiral, Carter meets a beautiful and accommodating woman—Saffron Burrows, truly luminous and hopefully well compensated—with whom to start over), and of course “American Beauty.” By now it’s hard to imagine Spacey ever emerging from that film’s unfortunate shadow, and after a decade of misbegotten ego-strokes (“Pay It Forward”) cringe-worthy cameos (“21”) and passion projects (“Beyond the Sea”), here he embraces the typecasting, playing to rather than above the material. Though too often relying on arch phrasing and a squint-eyed, stiff-necked condescension, he’s always more believable as a schemer than as an everyman. He’s got a surprisingly agile, vaguely volatile physical presence that gets wasted on sincerity, and in both “Shrink” and “American Beauty” warps into camp. Not yet even 50, Spacey seems doomed to play against his strengths.

For a film about fractured lives and painful recoveries, “Shrink” has an oddly brisk tempo and slick visual presentation. Time and again Pate employs music-vid montages to glide things forward, with DP Lukas Ettlin going slo-mo and burnishing everyone in late-day magic, and composers Brian Rietzell and Ken Andrews’s moody rock score inspiring a fuzzy fellow feeling. Implausible events and forced idiosyncrasies abound but never slow us down: white-collar Carter becomes best buds with his deadbeat dealer; a screenplay is written, pitched, discarded, lost, found on a city street by its secret subject, and green-lit in a few movie minutes; Robin Williams, sex addict, brags that, “In my day I balled a lot of chicks” and that a girl, “makes me harder than Chinese algebra”; and a single-screen movie house subsists on home rental favorites like “Fargo” and “The Graduate”. When Carter finally hits bottom - an event that no film that cares for its characters or about grief or addiction would take lightly—it’s played for a snazzy face-plant spectacle. On a Charlie Rose-like talk show hosted by Gore Vidal, a baked and boozy Carter tells the TV audience that he’s a fraud, and not to buy his bestselling book. “It’s all bullshit and then you die,” he says, to which Vidal wickedly retorts, “We knew that going in.” Alas, the same could be said for “Shrink.”

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

[Eric Hynes is a Reverse Shot staff writer.]