Shrunken heads

I’m trying to decide who’s crazier, the shrink played by Jude Law in Steven Soderbergh’s recent film Side Effects, or the shrink played by Rosario Dawson in Danny Boyle‘s recent film Trance.

Both are unethical at times. Both seem skeevy and manipulative at times. Both send people into altered states (Law using prescription drugs and Dawson using hypnosis). Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to place myself in the care of either fake psychiatrist.

Two nutty therapists — Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones — mess around with people’s meds and lives in Steven Soderbergh’s recent Side Effects.

Psychiatrists in movies rarely come off as rational, well-adjusted people. Oh, there are exceptions. But for every Good Will Hunting or Prince of Tides, there are a slew of movies like Basic Instinct, Whispers in the Dark, Raising Cain, Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Kevin Spacey in Shrink, Michael Caine in Quills, Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill, etc., etc.

Why does the psychiatrist in film come off as such a shady character? (Think quickly — if you dare — of Alan Alda’s creepy shrink peering around a doorframe in Whispers in the Dark.) Is there something about the profession that invites suspicion, or even the heebie-jeebies? Granted, in the Philippines, the field of psychiatry still carries a certain stigma. But in Hollywood? It’s as popular as drive-thru medical marijuana bars.

Anyway, in Side Effects, Law plays a shrink who agrees to administer clinical drug tests for a new depression medicine called Ablixa. He’s also treating a depressed woman (Rooney Mara) who, under the drug, offs her husband (Channing Tatum) with a kitchen knife. Her defense? The medicine made her sleepwalk, one of its side effects, so she wasn’t criminally responsible for the murder. Law treats her while she’s in a mental hospital for observation, and keeps dosing her with placebos and various pill cocktails until her unravels the truth about the plot to kill her husband. In short, Law breaks every possible code of psychiatric care while treating his “patient” — basically to save himself from being drummed out of the medical profession. (And he’s not even the worst. There’s an even dodgier shrink in the film played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.)

Okay, but at least he’s more sympathetic than Dawson’s character in Trance. Dawson plays Elizabeth, a therapist who specializes in hypnotherapy. She wants to help patient Simon (James McAvoy) remember where he placed an artwork stolen from a museum — or else his co-thieves will kill him. But the manipulations wind tighter than a thong on Kim Kardashian’s butt as Elizabeth plants post-hypnotic suggestions in Simon’s and other people’s heads. It’s enough to make you stop staring into her eyes.

Trance is hardly a good movie. It’s completely loopy, for one thing. But like Side Effects, it casts a perplexing light on therapy. Do all these people just exist to manipulate patients and poke around in their heads? Or is that just how they get their kicks?

Look into my eyes: Rosario Dawson plays a less-than-professional hypnotherapist in Danny Boyle’s Trance.

Perhaps psychiatry seems like such yummy fodder for Hollywood because it involves one person controlling another: this is not exactly an unusual relationship in Hollywood, or elsewhere for that matter. We are subconsciously afraid of being manipulated or given bum advice by people we trust. We fear giving out our secrets or personal information (well, pre-Facebook) because we think such information will be used against us.

Anyway, that’s my dimestore analysis. So for every Robin Williams gently leading Will Hunting back to the source of his trauma, there’s Anthony Hopkins prying secrets loose from Clarice Starling’s mental vault.

For every wise and kind Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, there’s Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Batman Begins.

For every Barbara Streisand counseling a wounded Nick Nolte, there’s Jeanne Tripplehorn playing a loony therapist in Basic Instinct or Marcia Gay Harden as an unethical one in First Wives’ Club.

(And on a side note, why are so many female therapists in movies unusually attractive? You’ve got Annabella Sciorra as the other shrink in Whispers in the Dark, hot shrink Madeleine Stowe in 12 Monkeys, plus the aforementioned Tripplehorn, Dawson and Zeta-Jones. Sure, you could argue that it’s because they’re played by glamorous actresses. But that can’t be the whole reason. Is Hollywood trying to say that you have to find a therapist physically attractive in order to become vulnerable and spill your innermost secrets? That’s just sick.)

Not even comedies are exempt. Sometimes shrinks go from being balanced and caring to completely unhinged, as Richard Dreyfuss did while treating needy patient Bill Murray in What About Bob?, or Billy Crystal’s nebbishy therapist does while treating mafia boss Robert De Niro in Analyze This. But usually, shrinks in comedies are depicted as merely ineffectual, obsessed with sex, or wrapped up in their own neuroses (see Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat). They’re not homicidal, as a rule.

Then there’s Michael Fassbender, playing the much-less-nutty psychiatrist Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Chock-Full-O-Nuts Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. The foundations of modern psychiatry never seemed as shaky as they do in this movie.

In truth, the duality between “good” and “bad” psychiatrists in the movies can seem as schizoid as Jim Carrey in Me, Myself and Irene. You don’t know which one to believe.

There are the “nuthouse” movies, in which therapists often seem more menacing than patients (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 12 Monkeys, Girl Interrupted); and then there are “caring” nuthouse movies, with people like Robin Williams (again) in Awakenings, or Christopher Plummer gathering up Russell Crowe’s marbles in A Beautiful Mind. So choose carefully, but don’t exceed recommended dosage.

The duality makes me think that Hollywood has a bipolar condition when it comes to psychiatry — at times manic, at times depressed — and I’m tempted to prescribe either Zoloft or Lexapro, but after all, I’m only a fake movie-analyst analyst, not a medically trained one.