Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian

Jimmy P. is another valiant attempt to make a movie about the therapeutic process. It succeeds better than most films that have come before it—films from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. However, this true story about a Blackfoot Indian WWII vet institutionalized in an army hospital, and the French anthropologist who engages with him in the talking cure is far too dry and unfocused to succeed as a narrative film. Working in English for the first time, French director Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, My Sex Life ... or How I Got into an Argument) shoots the movie in an erratic style with all kinds of odd camera angles and jarring editorial choices. The two lead performances by Benicio del Toro and Mathieu Amalric are always engaging and, at times, quite riveting, but the film around them never comes together in a way that enables us to understand what really happened for each man over the course of their sessions together. It seems as though Desplechin and his co-writers have tried to faithfully put on screen the pages of notes in Georges Devereux's case study (on which the film is based), but they've left out any meaningful analysis of what it all means, either at the time of the writing or now at the time of the film.