“JIMMY P.”My rating: B (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)
117 minutes | No MPAA rating
Mental health movies tend to run in well-established ruts.
The theraputic breakthrough. The hellish hospital. Indifferent doctors and sadistic aides/nurses.
“Jimmy P.” isn’t having any of that. This drama from French director Arnaud Desplechin (his last movie was 2008’s “A Christmas Tale,” a fondly remembered family drama with Catherine Daneuve as the head of a troubled but still tight family) is fiercely, stubbornly realistic. As well it should be, since Desplechin adapted it from a memoir by psychiatrist George Devereux, who worked for years at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka.
Jimmy Picard (Oscar winner Benicico del Toro) is a Blackfoot Indian from Montana, recently returned from World War II. While in France he suffered a severe head injury in a fall from a moving truck. Now he’s suffering from what today we’d call PTSD, which manifests itself in crippling headaches, blindness, and visual and auditory hallucinations.
The Veterans Administration sends him to Topeka, Kansas (it was shot in Michigan and Montana), where the doctors conclude there’s nothing wrong with him physically. Conventional psychiatric therapy seems the best option.
But Jimmy won’t talk. Though he can be perfectly lucid and even eloquent, something in his Native American background gets in the way of the probing that is part of therapy.
As a last resort, clinic head Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) calls an old friend, Romanian anthropologist and psychiatrist Devereux (Mathieu Almaric), who might be described as an Indian groupie. He’s fascinated with all things Native America and just spent two years living with a tribe in the Mojave Desert.
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