Contact: Mary Tressel
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Shrinkies: A Psychoanalytic Tribute to the Academy Awards
In tribute to the upcoming Academy Awards, the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society created a list of top psychological films for 2004.
While not all of the films on this list are vying for the “Best Picture” award, The Shrinkies deserves the attention of those who appreciate all things psychological.
Public Information Committee members Mali A. Mann, M.D., Judith Schiller, Ph.D., and Mark I. Levy, M.D. provided the commentary for each film and Dr. Mann added a more detailed look at “Closer.”
1. Kinsey: The life story of sex therapist Alfred Kinsey is presented with candor and wit. Kinsey illustrates that repressed trauma can be transmitted from the father to the son, who, in overcoming his father’s sexual repression, is also driven by his own sexual demons.
2. Million Dollar Baby: By bringing together two damaged and isolated characters on the fringes of society, Million Dollar Baby is a triumph of hope over despair that moves seamlessly into love conquering hopelessness.
The brilliance and power of the film rests upon impeccable character portraits by Clint Eastwood, Hillary Swank and Morgan Freeman.
3. Closer: Two male friends engage in deceptive affairs with vulnerable women to hurt one another.
Closer is an ironic title for a film that illustrates how language can be used as a weapon to destroy another human being and tear apart relationships.
4. Aviator: This film tells a sympathetic story of Howard Hughes’ precocious genius and his descent into madness.
Though his originality and drive were enormous, Hughes is helpless to stop the progress of the compulsions and delusions that lead him to deeply psychotic states.
5. Sideways: Sideways is a buddy road trip movie with a twist.
A soon-to-be-married man full of reckless bravado reveals his profound psychological dependence, while his friend, an anxious wine snob and author, overcomes ambivalence and self-doubt to reach for real love.
“Closer:” The Politics of Love Relationships
By Mali A. Mann, M.D.
By bringing “Closer” to the big screen, director Mike Nichols has done a disservice to the moving work of playwright Patrick Marber.
While the movie was artistically impressive, the overzealous sexuality and nudity portrayed on screen dilutes Marber’s message about love and how language can be used as a weapon to damage another in a relationship.
The film centers on four characters: Larry (portrayed by Clive Owen) is a voyeuristic, destructive dermatologist;
Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer for a London newspaper; Alice (Natalie Portman) is a former New Yorker who moves to London to start her life anew as a stripper; and Anna (Julia Roberts) is an American photographer who retreats to London after a failed marriage.
Larry and Dan develop a friendship after meeting in an Internet chat room. Their ensuing conversations are really battles in a war waged with one another through the so-called, from their point of view, “love relationships” they develop with Alice and Anna.
Portman provides a brilliant performance as the vulnerable and innocent Alice, while Owen excels as one of the most destructive, jealous and nasty characters in film.
The actors in “Closer” drop the word “love” so easily and carelessly that they send a message that nothing is lasting and as if they are playing a game with one another to see who comes out as a winner.
Quite the opposite of developing meaningful and close enough relationships, Larry and Dan use language as a weapon to drive a wedge between themselves and their lovers as they compete with fierce intensity with each other over Alice and Anna.
The film illustrates a whole new level of perversion, the desire to view another’s private life, in particular with an obsessional insistence to intrude in the sexual life and activities of the rival.
The two men switch radically from female sexual partner to the next partner. Their verbal and email exchanges point to a voyeuristic obsession with wanting to know the most intimate details of each other’s sexual lives.
In a movie titled “Closer,” there is nothing to draw about truly devoted and enduring love relationships and there seems to be a struggle for the optimal distancing and coming together.
Instead, the tremendously insincere and deceptive sexual relationships portray intimacy as a game, a politic of a love life.
This movie also show the gender difference—the way in which women deal with love objects and the way men do.
My view is that the poignant script written by Marber had a better place on the stage than in the cinema.
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