Psychotherapy is a damn hard thing to build a two-hour film around. Static and talky by nature, the traditional Freudian ¡°talking cure¡± tends to work best when there¡¯s some tension and antagonism in the relationship between doctor and patient, as in ¡°Girl, Interrupted¡± or ¡°Good Will Hunting.¡± Even ¡°A Dangerous Method,¡± which explored Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud¡¯s development of the practice, had to throw in professional rivalries and a torrid affair to spice things up.
Yet ¡°Jimmy P. Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian¡± not only serves up psychotherapy as its main course ¡ª two guys, sitting in a room, talking quietly ¡ª it develops a warm, trusting bond between them. The only dramatic tension comes from whether the patient¡¯s mysterious illness is in fact a physical or a mental one.
Certainly the patient¡¯s symptoms seem real enough: Jimmy P. (Benicio del Toro) is a Native American World War II vet with a head injury who seems to be suffering from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, with crippling headaches, vision loss and vertigo. His sister accompanies him to a veterans¡¯ hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where, after a battery of tests, the doctors come up with nothing. On the verge of diagnosing him as schizophrenic, one doctor calls in an old friend, real-life psychoanalyst Georges Devereux (played by Mathieu Amalric), who has some knowledge of Native American tribes. Devereux begins daily therapy with Jimmy, convinced he¡¯s not a nutcase, and equally convinced that he will find the root of the problem.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.