‘Tell a dream, lose a reader” is the Henry James advice that the makers of “Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” should have heeded.
The title character in this true story is a Blackfoot Indian (Benicio del Toro) who, in 1948, is suffering migraines and vision problems perhaps resulting from an injury suffered during World War II. Doctors at a Topeka, Kan., Veterans Affairs hospital can’t find anything physically wrong with him, so they call in a European-born New Yorker (Mathieu Amalric), who is an anthropologist, an expert on Indian cultures and also a dabbler in Freudian analysis.
Del Toro overdoes the anguish to the point of looking like he’s playing advanced constipation, and the film, by France’s Arnaud Desplechin, gets stuck in an endless series of therapy scenes built around cheesy re-enactments of Jimmy P’s dreams. As the patient’s symptoms gradually recede, what emerges from his subconscious, at great and stultifying length, is an almost comically woeful history of romantic and sexual problems with females, many of whom wound up dead.
Despite attempts to make all of this seem deep to analysis fanboys with Freudian (psycho)babble about Oedipus complexes and castration anxiety, the therapy sessions yield diminishing returns dramatically. The man’s got headaches because he’s had a miserable life. So what?