Tag Archives: Gabriel Byrne

May 07

“In Treatment”: Therapy for the Masses

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With a new and fourth season of In Treatment coming to HBO Max later this month, starring Uzo Aduba as the therapist, I’m posting today about the first three seasons (2008 to 2010). This series about Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) both providing therapy and receiving it was based on Hagai Levi‘s Israeli series Be’Tipul, which ran two seasons.

As reported by Gaby Wood, The Guardian, Be’Tipul‘s Levi was motivated by a desire to reduce mental health stigma in Israel. Levi felt that whereas in the U.S. “people mention their therapist at the drop of a hat,” not so in Israel. The series went on to become popular among clients, therapists, and many more, including those discovering acceptable therapy depiction for the first time.

In the American-made In Treatment Paul Weston’s therapist is Gina (Dianne Wiest). While Paul is a “boundary-challenged, deeply conflicted, terribly appealing psychotherapist” (Michelle Orange, New York Times), Gina “[cuts] through Weston’s self-absorbed obsessions” (Peabody Awards).

Clinicians and critics had varying but mostly positive opinions about In Treatment‘s portrayal of therapy sessions, viewed in 30-minute segments as opposed to the standard therapy “hour.” Psychologist Ryan Howes, self-confessed lover/hater of the series, listed his pros and cons in a Psychology Today article titled  “In Treatment Ambivalence.”

Excerpts from a sampling of Howes’s cons:

    • …Paul often begins sparring with new patients before they take off their coat…
    • Paul attended a psychoanalytic institute, but his therapeutic approach doesn’t always appear psychodynamic. It’s more like Rogerian reflection and withholding, which results in the frustrated patient demanding advice, followed by Paul’s defensive reaction and howitzer-like interpretation.
    • In each episode you’ll hear several variations of an accusatory: “so you’re telling me…” or “you think I’m saying…” or “what’s that supposed to mean?” followed by an infuriating misinterpretation. Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea: Introducing The In Treatment Drinking Game: take a shot every time someone makes an assumption, questions the validity of therapy and/or storms out of the session early.

A sampling of pros:

    • The writers may not have Ph.D.’s, but they get a lot right about therapy….
    • It reveals the “layers of the onion” in therapy incredibly well. The patients enter therapy with an immediate and obvious complaint. As the weeks unfold, you see how the problem has roots that extend deeper and deeper.
    • I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors that complaints are made to licensing boards about Paul’s behaviors. If this is true, I love this….

At the start of the second season Jeremy Clyman, Psy.D, wrote in Psychology Today, “At last the field of clinical psychology has a show free of melodrama and full of the detail and depth necessary to realistically represent the therapeutic process. Predictably enough, patients all across the country are discussing the show in therapy and therapists are discussing it with each other.”

Because Be’Tipul only had two seasons, the third In Treatment season was created from scratch. Furthermore, it involved Paul having a different therapist (Amy Ryan). A fitting summary from Nancy Doyle Palmer, HuffPost:

Ryan plays Adele, Paul’s end-of-the week analyst and foil, who at first glance seemed perhaps too young and fresh-faced for the task — but quickly took on him, his patients’ issues of the week and his 30 year plus roster of mommy/mentor/tortured Irish issues. She’s pitch perfect in a completely new way and knows just how to handle him…

While demonstrating the finest qualities of a therapist Monday through Thursday – deeply caring, observant, benevolent and wise – Paul comes to Adele (as he did to Weist’s Gina) often in a rage – harsh, condescending, duplicitous and game-playing – basically giving credence to the fact that doctors are the worst patients ever and shrinks, well…

Feb 28

“Mad to Be Normal”: R.D. Laing, Psychiatrist

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David Tennant stars as R.D. Laing (1927-1989) in Robert Mullan‘s new film Mad to be Normal, now on DVD, which places much of its focus on Laing’s work between 1965-70 at Kingsley Hall (London), his residential facility for those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Laing was both a psychiatrist and an author who, though not to his own liking, became viewed as leader of an “anti-psychiatry” movement. One of his controversial theories was that schizophrenia sprang from environmental dysfunction, often within the family—as in “a hopeless ‘heads-I-win, tails-you-lose’ emotional situation…Finding such a situation intolerable, a boy or girl escapes this unbearable pain through schizophrenia” (New York Times).

Stephen Dalton (Hollywood Reporter) states that Laing “was something like a Scottish Timothy Leary, a Swinging Sixties counterculture icon who attracted a cult following among the young, shared a stage with The Grateful Dead and dropped LSD with Sean Connery….A radical opponent of prison-like asylums and anti-psychotic drugs, the Glasgow-born guru challenged the medical establishment while enjoying a hedonistic rock-star lifestyle, partying with famous fans including The Beatles.”

Interestingly, in the book R.D. Laing: A Life his son Adrian described the fact that “despite his astonishing empathy with the disturbed, Laing failed to address his own family problems…” (publisher’s blurb).

Watch the trailer for Mad to Be Normal:

Diagnosed herself with schizophrenia, Stephanie Allan has written a review for The Psychologist. An excerpt: “The impact of Laing’s work that resonates most heavily today is that madness is an understandable response to ‘unlivable situations’; he would even describe extreme mental states as a ‘voyage of self-discovery’. However, these passionate beliefs aren’t demonstrated in any of the Kingsley Hall characters, and I found their portrayal lacking…”

Film critic Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, is a bit more complimentary, on the other hand: “…Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon are excellent as his patients: old men who in a later era might be overlooked as care-in-the-community homeless.”

Untrue elements include the existence of Elisabeth Moss as “Laing’s (composite-fictional) partner Angie,” according to Bradshaw, as well as the following, as detailed by Hollywood Reporter:

The real-life death of Laing’s daughter Susan (Alexandra Finnie) from leukemia is brought forward by a decade, a clumsy chronological contrivance of questionable taste. A prickly meeting between Laing and his starchy battle-axe mother also feels like a jarringly artificial bid to stoke up Freudian psychodrama.

Among the fictionalized regulars at Kingsley Hall are Jim (Byrne), a volatile Anglo-Irish depressive who jealously guards his connection to Laing, and Sidney (Gambon), an elderly lost soul who agrees to take LSD to help resolve the lingering trauma of his parents’ death in a grisly murder-suicide. Strangely, Mullan overlooks some of the community’s most famous real alumni, including Mary Barnes, a schizophrenic who became a celebrated painter. Mad to Be Normal also suggests Kingsley Hall was forced to close in 1970 in response to thuggishly hostile locals and self-serving establishment doctors. The real chain of events was inevitably more complex, and involved two patients jumping from the roof.

Dalton’s conclusion, in part:

Almost three decades after his death, the value of Laing’s contributions to psychiatry remain contentious, particularly as he embraced more esoteric New Age methods in later life, declined into alcoholism and lost his license to practice. Mullan’s take-home message is not wholly uncritical but obviously partisan, concluding with the simplistic claim that Laing’s ideas ‘live on.’

Apr 17

“Carrie Pilby”: Genius Teen in Need of Therapy

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Carrie Pilby is a new comedy/drama based on a novel by Caren Lissner about a highly intelligent young woman in therapy with a carin’ listener. Art imitating name?

Christy Lemire, rogerebert.com, sets up the plot and primary characterization of the titular character, a motherless child played by Bel Powley:

Carrie is the smartest person in the room at all times but she’s too miserable to enjoy it. She has trouble dating and making friends but she’s never at a loss for words. And while she has incisive analysis on the ready, regardless of the situation, she has a harder time understanding herself.

‘What’s so great about being happy, anyway?’ Carrie asks her therapist (Nathan Lane) in one of her weekly sessions, which give the film its narrative structure. ‘There are some brilliant, unhappy people.’ But the therapist, who’s a longtime friend of Carrie’s wealthy, widower father (Gabriel Byrne), is well aware of what an unusual young lady she is. A native Londoner, Carrie now lives by herself in Manhattan. She skipped three grades and graduated from Harvard at 18. A year later, she works as a proofreader at a law firm but doesn’t really need the job.

Whereas in the novel Carrie’s therapist, Dr. Petrov, gives her a 5-point therapy plan, in the movie it’s a 6-pointer. First, the plan presented in the book, per Reading for Sanity:

1. List 10 things you love (and DO THEM!)

2.  Join a club (and TALK TO PEOPLE!)

3.  Go on a date (with someone you actually LIKE!)

4.  Tell someone you care (your therapist doesn’t count!)

5.  Celebrate New Year’s (with OTHER PEOPLE!)

As played out in the film (Rex Reed, New York Observer): “Clearly flummoxed by her maverick, unorthodox nonconformity, [Carrie’s shrink] gives her a list of goals she should achieve before the end of the year if she wants to be happy. Go on a date. Get a pet. Make a friend. Spend New Year’s Eve with someone. Carrie Pilby is about how a girl who is profoundly disappointed in the rest of mankind decides to follow her doctor’s advice: ‘Give humanity a chance. Someone might surprise you.'”

Alternatively, a snarkier description of this “feeble plot device” by David Ehrlich, Indiewire: “‘Get a job.’ ‘Make a friend.’ ‘Go on a date with Jason Ritter’ (great in an unflattering role). ‘Try to distract viewers from the overwhelmingly obvious fact that you’re going to end up with the handsome neighbor (William Moseley) who exists for no other reason than to be the nice guy who’s been right in front of you the whole time’…He’s quite a perceptive therapist, really.”

In the trailer below is Dr. Petrov’s humble admission that he doesn’t “have all the answers”—“which is just about the most important thing a young person can hear, and somehow, despite the far-fetched nature of this film, comes off as inspiring,” states Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian.

Other characters of interest include a coworker played by Vanessa Bayer and a boundary-violating former professor (Colin O’Donoghue). Watch below:

The following review excerpt by Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter, seems to aptly reflect the generally mixed reactions among critics: “At its worst, the film oozes the sickly smugness of a self-help pamphlet, but when it relaxes its didactic grip and lets the actors take control it can be quite charming. Powley verbally spars elegantly with her co-stars, and the best scenes are the volleys of banter back and forth between her and Carrie’s potential suitors, first Jason Ritter, nervy as an MIT grad with whom Carrie goes on a blind date, and then William Moseley as the music geek boy next door.”

Update and Spoiler Now That I’ve Seen It (2018): That Carrie’s therapist has been her parents’ friend isn’t the only inappropriate therapy boundary in this movie. When Carrie also pops in on her therapist at unappointed times, for instance, and pries deeply personal info out of him, it is he, of course, who is at fault by allowing this.

Nov 23

“Louder Than Bombs”: Deception in Grief

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…Louder Than Bombs is interested in the intersection between grief and memory, and how difficult it is to capture both either through photography or film. Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com

Looking for an intense dysfunctional-family drama? David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter, sets up the plot of Joachim Trier‘s 2015 Louder Than Bombs, seemingly overlooked in theaters but now available on DVD:

Three years after the death of celebrated war photographer Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a major exhibition is being planned and her longtime colleague Richard (David Strathairn) is writing a New York Times feature pegged to the opening. We learn via a quick montage of award speeches, interviews and news reports that Isabelle did her best work by remaining in conflict zones after the tanks pulled out, in order to capture the consequences of war. It’s also revealed that she died not in the field but shortly after retiring, in a road accident just a few miles from her home in Nyack, New York.

Richard respectfully informs Isabelle’s widower, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), that he intends to reveal the full circumstances of her death in the profile; it’s believed that she drove deliberately into an oncoming truck. Gene asks for time to tell his withdrawn youngest son Conrad (Devin Druid), who was just 12 when his mother died and has been spared any knowledge of her apparent suicide. Conrad’s older brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) takes a break from his wife, his new baby and his college professor job to come sort through Isabelle’s studio for material from her final trip to Syria to be included in the show.

Jesse Cataldo, Slant: “…(D)espite its status as the emotional and narrative center of the film, the exact nature of Isabelle’s death is never clarified. Possible scenarios are glimpsed via the daydreams of one character, and discussed obliquely by others, but precise explanations are avoided.”

The trailer:

Themes and Meaning

Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice: “A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes…a story of parents and children in which we’re pulled by the currents and countercurrents of desperation, depression, and love.”

Sasha Stone, The Wrap: “…(W)hat are we obligated to tell our loved ones? What are we obligated to tell our wives to prevent their getting hurt by the things we do? What are the benefits of deception? What is the eventual harm?”

Selected Reviews

Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post: “Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.”

Michael Rose, Huffington Post: “Some might fault Trier for tackling subjects about people who appear to have it all. In ‘Louder Than Bombs,’ the angst of the upper middle class becomes universal as Trier takes us into their struggle to find what it takes to hold a family together.”

Guy Lodge, Time Out : “…(T)he emotional conclusions here can be a little pat, and catharsis too easily come by. It’s more cautiously sound-proofed than its title implies. Only when Huppert’s on screen does the film feel it could detonate at any moment.”