In Treatment - season 3 (2010) - García's psychiatrist drama reaches towering peak

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Identity soul-searching and four fresh patient faces are teased on this dark poster for Rodrigo García's In Treatment - season 3

An Indian-American married couple bring the husband's Indian father Sunil to Brooklyn-based psychotherapist Paul Weston, because they are worried about his despondent behavior 6 months after the death of his wife in Calcutta. A combative former TV star actress with symbolic razor blade elbows is having trouble remembering her lines, and Weston suspects Parkinson's Disease. Jesse is a gay 16 year-old boy, who is acting out in a passive-aggressive manner, in an identity crisis around his biological parents, who gave him up for adoption. Paul himself is still unhappy, having trouble sleeping and also worried that he might have Parkinson's. His new therapist Adele sees through his curtains.

Sunil opens up about his cultural issues with his son's marriage and Western culture in general. Paul digs into his Indian past, and Sunil's increasingly alarming behavior towards his daughter-in-law, whom he is sure is cheating on his son. This culminates with his arrest and deportation, which Sunil himself provoked consciously, using Paul as an instrument.

Jesse has unrealistic plans about an art school education and continually provokes his surroundings for effect. He brings his mother to one session and provides spectacularly crude behavior in an attempt to learn of his biological roots. He shows up on Paul's doorstep one evening after a visit at his bio-parents, while Paul's son Max starts a minor fire in their kitchen. Jesse later decides that all the blame for his problems stem from his mother and decides to end therapy.

Frances' sessions revolve around her sister, their mother's favorite, in Frances' words, her own alienated daughter Izzy and her lacking sense of self-worth and extreme self-absorption. Paul urges her to see her sister, who is fatally ill.

Paul's sessions with Adele have his innate self-pity at the center, and his dissatisfaction with his former therapist and mentor Gina, which Adele cuts effectively through. He soon grows enamored with her, and her competent competence and clarity is sorely needed in Paul's dark world.

Paul ends up after the season's mostly unsatisfactory patient relations making the drastic decision, - a late midlife crisis? - to shut down his practice to start, instead, living in the 'real world'. Adele, professional to the very end, when he also ends his sessions with her, resists any direct reaction to his obvious attraction to her.

In Treatment - season 3 is created by Rodrigo García (Six Fee Under (2001-05)). While the two first seasons were close adaptations of the two seasons of Israeli TV-series Be Tipul (2005-08), the third is entirely original.

The complex adult drama peaks here in a thematically dense and highly rewarding third season, the last focusing on Gabriel Byrne's (Hereditary (2018)) Paul Weston character. Byrne is still fully on point as the beleaguered psychotherapist. The three patients are interesting, with Irrfan Khan's (Hindi Medium (2017)) riveting performance as Sunil the jewel of the three. Several of their sessions make for downright masterly television. Debra Winger (Legal Eagles (1986)) is outstanding in the moving portrait of Frances, an evocative portrayal of a woman caught in the particular hell of extreme self-absorption. And Dane DeHaan (The Kid (2019)) is good as the sometimes frightening Jesse, a struggling young man with sociopathic tendencies.

Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone (2007)) is exactly the unaffected, uninvolved remedy of clarity that Weston seems to be missing, and she, too, is terrific here. The show is photographed to reflect the intense psycho-dramatic shifts, both written, acted and directed without blemishes. A smash of a season.

Best episodes:

1: Sunil: Week One - Written by Adam Rapp (Vinyl (2016, TV-series)), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake (2006)), García; directed by Paris Barclay (Monsters (2022-24))

Sunil is introduced to Western therapy by his son and daughter-in-law in the season's promising and intriguing opening episode.

4. Adele - Week One - Written by Anya Epstein (The Beat (2000, TV-series)), Dan Futterman (Foxcatcher (2014)), Garcìa; directed by Barclay

The arrogant veteran psychiatrist meets a critical younger expertise. Paul's first session with his new therapist Adele is phenomenal.

Related posts:

Rodrigo García: 2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]

Albert Nobbs (2011) - Glenn Close's triumphant, tender tranformation in García's great film

In Treatment - season 2 (2009) - Advanced character drama 

In Treatment - season 1 (2008) - Red-hot performances fuel heavy therapy drama 
Carnivàle - 1st season (2003, TV-series) - Grand but oft clotted-up period mystery show

 

Watch a trailer for the season here

Cost: Unknown

Box office: None - TV-series

= Uncertain

[In Treatment - season 3 debuted 25 October - 7 December (HBO) and runs 28 episodes of an average 25 minutes each, coming to approximately 700 minutes. Shooting took place in New York. The viewer ratings are regrettably not public information. The show was rebooted for a 4th and final season at HBO in 2021 with Uzu Aduba portraying the new therapist. García returned with Albert Nobbs (2011). Byrne returned in I, Anna (2012). In Treatment - season 3 is certified fresh at 85 % at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of In Treatment - season 3?

Gone Baby Gone (2007) - Difficult decisions await in Affleck's Lehane adaptation crime drama debut

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Casey Affleck holds a gun and has turned his back turned towards the camera against a dramatic sunset on this poster for his brother Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone

Two private detectives are hired to investigate the abduction of a girl by the name Amanda. A missing person's case that gets deeper with each step.

Gone Baby Gone is written by Aaron Stockard (The Town (2010)) and great, debuting, Californian co-writer-director Ben Affleck (Argo (2012)), adapting Dennis Lehane's (The Given Day (2008)) same-titled 1998 novel. The plot moves in similar thematic waters to Clint Eastwood's great Lehane-adaptation Mystic River (2003), also a crime drama about child endangerment in Boston, Massachusetts.
The casting is on point, the performances and the local Boston colors are fine, (Affleck grew up in Boston.) But something about the film's structure is off, and the third act seems to last the whole second half of Gone Baby Gone.
Ben Affleck's little brother Casey Affleck (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)) plays our protagonist private investigator Patrick Kenzie, SPOILER who seems to make the wrong decision in the pensive, stone-in-the-shoe ending to the film. Affleck the filmmaker deserves a compliment for staying in the difficult story here, and for making moral questions a cornerstone in it.

Related posts:

Ben Affleck: Argo (2012) or, The Hollywood Hero (producer-director-star)

The Town (2010) - Renner stands out in entertaining, flawed training picture for Affleck (co-writer/director/co-star)

Armageddon (1998) or, Macho Men Save Earth From Disaster! (actor)

Dazed and Confused (1993) - Linklater's stoner youth nostalgia is a blast (actor)

Watch the opening three minutes of the film here

Cost: 19 mil. $
Box office: 34.6 mil. $
= Big flop (1.82 times the cost)
[Gone Baby Gone premiered 5 September (Deauville Film Festival, France) and runs 114 minutes. Shooting took place in Massachusetts, including Boston, and in California from May - August 2006. The film opened and peaked #6 to a 5.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it grossed solid 20.3 mil. $ (58.7 % of the total gross). Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 3.6 mil. $ (10.4 %) and France with 2.7 mil. $ (7.8 %). Its performances in many other markets were too small for it to succeed theatrically overall. Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5/4 star review, translating to a notch better than this review. It was nominated for an Oscar: Best Supporting Actress (Amy Ryan), lost to Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton. The film was also nominated for a Golden Globe, won 2 National Board of Review awards and many other honors. It has been listed on annual top 10 lists by at least 65 film critics. Ben Affleck returned with UNHCR-themed video short Gimme Shelter (2008) and theatrically with inferior, Boston-set heist movie The Town (2010). Casey Affleck returned in The Killer Inside Me (2010). Gone Baby Gone is certified fresh at 94 % with a 7.7/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Gone Baby Gone?

The Changeling (2008) or, The Christine Collins Story

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One well-designed if not exactly striking poster for Clint Eastwood's The Changeling

The Changeling is master director/actor Clint Eastwood's (Mystic River (2003)) first film that he directed, which came out in 2008; the second one, Gran Torino (2008) beats Changeling by miles.

The film is based on an incredible true story of a single mother in Los Angeles in 1928, who lost her 9 year-old son while at work one day and had to go through years of terrible trials to find out what had happened to him.

Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted (1999)), who was Oscar-nominated for her performance, plays the mother, and she is often quite good, although not sublime. I am decidedly not a Jolie fan; not that I have anything particularly against her, but her films just so rarely excite me in any way.
Her co-star is John Malkovich, who overacts in at least one instance and seems overly angry, to the point where you almost fear that he will bite other character's heads off.
The story develops dramatically around its middle, when SPOILER the serial killer of children, who was responsible for the disappearance and murder of the boy, enters the story, and if Changeling wasn't based on a true story and told soberly stylistically and dramatically, most would have mentally left the film at this point.
Instead, some of us then just have to see, what happened to little Walter.
Changeling has very nice costumes by Deborah Hopper (Flags of Our Fathers (2006)) and presents reproductions of late 1920's and 30's Los Angeles, which is a pleasure to behold for anyone with an interest in the city of angels.
But over-all I must say that I didn't enjoy the film. Plot-wise, things go haywire around 10 minutes into Changeling when the boy goes missing, and it pretty much just gets worse from then on, with very slight tendencies in the other direction, for SPOILER its entire 141 minute playtime. It is a very oppressive and unpleasant story. - Corruption, terrible abuse of power, mental illness, missing children and a mass murder of children needs a very special film in order to feel tolerable, and I was sighing my way through Changeling, unfortunately not finding this to be the case here.

The details:

There are some key scenes that just don't work: I am thinking in particular of two scenes with two different boys, who have important roles for the investigation into the missing boys' cases:

This still is from the first one, in which the boy in the picture confesses SPOILER that he was co-responsible for the murders of as many as 20 boys. This may very well be historically accurate, but the boy didn't make me believe it was, and maybe it was simply too difficult a scene to make stick. It certainly is an extreme confession from such a young individual to recreate.
Later, another interrogation of a boy who got away also goes awry emotionally, as the boy plays the scene in a near-catatonic state.
Changeling has other good things in it, though: Amy Ryan (The Office (2008-11)) is nice as a wrongly imprisoned prostitute, and Jason Butler Harner (Kill the Irishman (2011)) makes an impressive and credible portrait of the repugnant mass-murderer. The film also bolsters one of the all-time greatest SPOILER execution scenes, as Harner's killer is hanged in San Quentin.
Still, Changeling ranks among Eastwood's lesser films in my opinion. Similarly, I never cared much for his other big, but much more successful female hero drama, Million Dollar Baby (2004). Perhaps Eastwood's talent simply lies mostly with male characters.
- His next film will be such a one, American Sniper (2014) is coming soon.


Related reviews:

Clint Eastwood: Tightrope (1984) - An undervalued Clint Eastwood sex killer thriller (actor)
Any Which Way You Can (1980) or, More Monkey Business! (actor)
The Beguiled (1971) - Intense, erotic Civil War kammerspiel thriller (actor)
Coogan's Bluff (1968) or, Dopes and Hippies, Beat It! (actor)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) or, Killer in a Poncho (actor)

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 55 mil. $
Box office: 113 mil. $
= Minor flop
[The Changeling premiered to a warm reception in Cannes and was met with a more lukewarm embrace at home in the US, where it earned 35.7 mil. $ of its over-all take. Its general critical reception is a bit more positive than Film Excess's; it holds a 6.3 rating on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The Changeling?
Do you agree that Clint Eastwood is best with stories about male protagonists?