SHRINK (Jonas Pate). 110 minutes. Opens Friday (July 31). For venues, times and trailers, see Movies. Rating: NNN
Though it’s exactly the sort of hand-?wringing L.A. indie I’ve come to loathe, Shrink is not exactly loathsome. It doesn’t change a single note in the everybody-?hurts melody, but it plays the tune better than most of the other Crash wannabes.[rssbreak]
In Thomas Moffett’s script, which offers the usual mixture of calculation and uplift, a bunch of people – a struggling screenwriter (Mark Webber), a couple of movie stars (Jack Huston channelling Russell Brand and Saffron Burrows), their germophobic agent (Dallas Roberts), his pregnant assistant (Pell James) and an angry schoolgirl (Keke Palmer) – spend their days being unfulfilled and/or coping with private pain in the Los Angeles area.
Most of them are connected in some way to Kevin Spacey’s depressed therapist, a formerly chipper fellow now wandering through his life in a haze of pot smoke and spending his nights sleeping anywhere but his beautifully appointed bedroom. (Clue!)
Are unexpected connections forged? Are epiphanies reached? Well, yeah – this is, after all, a feel-?good movie about people feeling bad. And even if there isn’t a single surprise to be had, director Jonas Pate has assembled a fine cast and allowed them to put interesting little spins on their stock characters.
He even makes Robin Williams halfway tolerable in an unbilled cameo as a mopey alcoholic who’d rather be diagnosed as a sex addict, presumably because it’ll play better on the front page of the Enquirer.
