If you’ve ever been in therapy, or at least knew someone who was in therapy, you probably know that the patients’ holy grail is to find out something about their psychologist: a scrap of information thrown into the air, a deep roll, or just staring at the bookshelf. Who are these mysterious people who know everything about you but reveal so little about themselves? Do an experiment: ask the average patient how happy they would be to grab their psychologist for a reverse session, where they ask the questions, and watch their eyes light up.
But there are those who dream and there are those who do. There are also those who don’t just do it, but they also do it in front of a camera, and then turn it into a movie on Netflix. Of course it helps that this is not just a person from the settlement but Jonah Hill, a great comic-and-sometimes-dramatic actor (“Superbad”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”) who recently also quietly begins to develop a directing career (“Mid90s”, a small film And it’s nice that he quietly directed a few years ago). Now he comes to Netflix with an unusual film, most of which is a conversation with his psychologist, Phil Stutz – one of the leading therapists in Hollywood (my God, the amount of stories this man has and is not allowed to tell).
But already from the first seconds of the trailer you can see that Statz is not really a typical psychologist, and that is actually what allows this film to exist. Stutz is not satisfied with the traditional position of the nodding psychologist – he takes a much more active place in Hill’s life (and, presumably, the rest of his patients as well) and is not afraid to give Hill advice, including on how to make the film. And so, as expected, Hill himself quickly gives up the seemingly objective position of the documentarian and begins to open himself up in front of the cameras, with all the anxieties, body image matters, mourning the death of his older brother (who died at the age of 40) and the other troubles that accompany him throughout his life. “This is going to be either the best docu ever, or the worst,” Stutz laughs with Hill at the end of the trailer. Won’t you go see such a psychologist?