November 22, 2022
MOVIE: STUTZ
DIRECTED BY JONAH HILL
STARRING JONAH HILL, PHIL STUTZ
RATING: 3 STARS (Out of 4)
Psychiatry and psychotherapy in film can make for some interesting character studies (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, HBO’s The Treatment.) Sometimes it’s the clients that are fascinating subjects, sometimes it’s the psychiatrist. In Jonah Hill’s new documentary, Stutz, the actor attempts to turn the tables on his own therapist, Phil Stutz. His intention, he states, is to make people aware of Stutz’s tools and ideas to make their lives better. It’s a fairly original concept and made me initially think that this might be a stimulating discussion with a great mind being interviewed such as the Bill Moyers’ classic The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. Ok, Jonah Hill isn’t exactly Bill Moyers but you get the idea.
What the film develops into is something totally different though. I quickly began noticing the positioning of cameras in the room and how unnatural it felt to a therapy session. At one point, I counted at least four different camera set ups including point of view shots, close-ups, profiles, and others. Hill had set this up to be a day with Stutz but then he pulls back the veil and reveals that he’d actually been shooting for months and what we thought was Stutz’s office is actually a studio with a green screen. Huh?! It’s a very strange turn of events that makes this film, in part, a film about making this type of film. Now, I always like very meta and self-reflexive films but this takes us into a realm where we can never quite believe what we are seeing or hearing. Yet, Stutz’s tools and thoughts are still examined.
He discusses concepts such as one’s life force (body, people, and yourself), part x (our judgmental side), strings of pearls (forward motion), our shadow, the snapshot (the perfect life), the maze, active love, etc. It’s all pretty heady stuff but Stutz makes it generally understandable and relatable. Hill illustrates the ideas using Stutz’s drawings which are regularly a part of his sessions. These may be the best parts of the film. Yet what makes it original and perplexing is the aforementioned breakdown of the wall between private session and manufactured setting. (Even Jonah Hill at one point takes off a wig he’s been wearing since the film was shot over many months.)
We do end up learning a lot about Stutz including his troubled childhood and his progressing Parkinson’s Disease. Why Stutz agreed to be part of this is unknown. Generally, therapists rarely turn the tables around in this way. Is he really helping Hill by agreeing to open up so much about himself?
Often throughout the film, attention is turned back to Hill. He’s very reluctant to talk about himself and only in the latter parts of the project do we get a sense of Hill’s very serious struggles with his weight, self-esteem, success, and feelings about the loss of his brother a few years earlier. He recognizes how much he’s been hiding and how important vulnerability is to self-improvement.
So, what do we really get out of this experience? Clearly these two figures have a very special bond that goes beyond normative client-therapist boundaries. Still, a lot IS revealed, there’s a lot of laughter, and one could pick up an idea or two from Stutz. How the psychology community would feel about all of this is questionable. As a film, it’s not uninteresting and it is more than just two people talking for 90+ minutes. It’s an experiment that seemed to be important for Hill to make. Whether people care about it or not seems irrelevant to him.
Stutz is currently streaming on Netflix.
MOVIE: STUTZ
DIRECTED BY JONAH HILL
STARRING JONAH HILL, PHIL STUTZ
RATING: 3 STARS (Out of 4)
Psychiatry and psychotherapy in film can make for some interesting character studies (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, HBO’s The Treatment.) Sometimes it’s the clients that are fascinating subjects, sometimes it’s the psychiatrist. In Jonah Hill’s new documentary, Stutz, the actor attempts to turn the tables on his own therapist, Phil Stutz. His intention, he states, is to make people aware of Stutz’s tools and ideas to make their lives better. It’s a fairly original concept and made me initially think that this might be a stimulating discussion with a great mind being interviewed such as the Bill Moyers’ classic The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. Ok, Jonah Hill isn’t exactly Bill Moyers but you get the idea.
What the film develops into is something totally different though. I quickly began noticing the positioning of cameras in the room and how unnatural it felt to a therapy session. At one point, I counted at least four different camera set ups including point of view shots, close-ups, profiles, and others. Hill had set this up to be a day with Stutz but then he pulls back the veil and reveals that he’d actually been shooting for months and what we thought was Stutz’s office is actually a studio with a green screen. Huh?! It’s a very strange turn of events that makes this film, in part, a film about making this type of film. Now, I always like very meta and self-reflexive films but this takes us into a realm where we can never quite believe what we are seeing or hearing. Yet, Stutz’s tools and thoughts are still examined.
He discusses concepts such as one’s life force (body, people, and yourself), part x (our judgmental side), strings of pearls (forward motion), our shadow, the snapshot (the perfect life), the maze, active love, etc. It’s all pretty heady stuff but Stutz makes it generally understandable and relatable. Hill illustrates the ideas using Stutz’s drawings which are regularly a part of his sessions. These may be the best parts of the film. Yet what makes it original and perplexing is the aforementioned breakdown of the wall between private session and manufactured setting. (Even Jonah Hill at one point takes off a wig he’s been wearing since the film was shot over many months.)
We do end up learning a lot about Stutz including his troubled childhood and his progressing Parkinson’s Disease. Why Stutz agreed to be part of this is unknown. Generally, therapists rarely turn the tables around in this way. Is he really helping Hill by agreeing to open up so much about himself?
Often throughout the film, attention is turned back to Hill. He’s very reluctant to talk about himself and only in the latter parts of the project do we get a sense of Hill’s very serious struggles with his weight, self-esteem, success, and feelings about the loss of his brother a few years earlier. He recognizes how much he’s been hiding and how important vulnerability is to self-improvement.
So, what do we really get out of this experience? Clearly these two figures have a very special bond that goes beyond normative client-therapist boundaries. Still, a lot IS revealed, there’s a lot of laughter, and one could pick up an idea or two from Stutz. How the psychology community would feel about all of this is questionable. As a film, it’s not uninteresting and it is more than just two people talking for 90+ minutes. It’s an experiment that seemed to be important for Hill to make. Whether people care about it or not seems irrelevant to him.
Stutz is currently streaming on Netflix.