Struck by "Stutz"

Hi everyone,

I want to talk about "Stutz" (2022).

The conceit of this documentary film is that it is a vehicle through which director Jonah Hill can more broadly disseminate strategies he has learned from his therapist, psychiatrist Phil Stutz.  Shot in black-and-white, the film has a stripped-bare presentation that masks the rich complexity it contains.  

The film opens with Stutz and Hill appearing to sit down for a therapy session, at times gazing directly into the camera.  As Hill and Stutz simultaneously break the fourth wall and speak to each other, the audience is actively drawn into the surprisingly open yet intimate relationship between the two men.  It is as if we are simultaneously patient and therapist, Hill and Stutz, studying, listening to, and engaging with each other.

Of course, as a psychologist, I am prone to apply particular suspicion and scrutiny to a film like this.  It is very rare for therapy to be accurately and constructively portrayed in media--to the contrary, its portrayals often offer lurid and over-dramatized versions of therapy in which therapists are often varyingly cold, inept, superior, or outright irresponsible, which pisses me off because it likely decreases the likelihood that some people who would benefit from therapy will ever get it.  

In addition, the very premise of this film--bringing cameras into the sacred, private space of a therapist's office--majorly raises both red flags and my hackles.  It runs totally counter to the ways therapists are supposed to work with their clients, where one of our most serious responsibilities is to protect our clients' right to a private space where they can talk about their most vulnerable, personal, and raw thoughts, emotions, and experiences.  It makes me extremely leery of the kind of clinician who would therefore agree to this kind of intrusion into his patient's therapeutic process.

I will also note that I have a bit of a pet peeve about practitioners lightly repackaging already-established evidence-based therapies and presenting them as innovation, which Stutz arguably does with some of his proposed strategies.  That said, it can absolutely be valuable for clinicians to be able to make the strategies they teach their clients their own, to live with and in them to ensure they are robust and useful, and it's Hill that is touting Stutz's strategies as ground-breaking way more than Stutz himself.  I actually suspect that this is less about Stutz's ego than it is about Hill not having an effective therapist before.

Despite myself, I nevertheless put my misgivings aside as this movie continued to unfold, revealing ever deeper and deeper levels of therapeutic connection between Stutz and Hill.  Without going into spoilers territory, through a series of little twists "Stutz" does a beautiful job of side-stepping the potentially very boring and self-aggrandizing movie about a celebrity and his therapist that it very possibly could have become.

Broadly speaking, this is accomplished because both Hill and Stutz mutually agree to get ever more self-revealing as the film progresses.  As a result, the lines between therapist and client are blurred and perforated in ways that, surprisingly, seem--at least for this particular dyad--constructive rather than contraindicated.  When Stutz shares details of his life, Hill greets them with the gentle and respectful curiosity that has clearly been modeled to him by his therapist.  More than the admittedly interesting and likely helpful strategies Stutz describes in the film, it appears clear that the deep mutual understanding the two men share is what is largely responsible for the benefits Hill has enjoyed in his work with Stutz.

I was struck especially by moments when Stutz and Hill said "I love you" to each other, in a way that felt representative of a platonic ideal of friendship between two people who truly care about each other and hold each other in high regard.  While in many circumstances given the power dynamics inherent in a therapist-client relationship it would make me incredibly concerned to hear that a therapist had said that to a client and it is not something that I would ever say as a therapist, these moments nevertheless gave me pause because of their radical vulnerability, authenticity, and warmth.  It's not a choice I would make as a clinician, but to my surprise, I can't say it's the wrong choice for this particular therapist and client.

Ultimately, this film is actually a rare and precious peek into some of the best therapy has to offer.  "Stutz" does a beautiful job showing how, at its best, therapy is a beautifully bidirectional process; to be a good therapist requires showing up for one's clients not just as an expert, but as a human being, which means being vulnerable and open to being changed by our clients as we hope to help our clients change.  Instead of aspiring to be the aloof and inscrutable tabula rasa of previous generations of therapists, Stutz provides a model of radical authenticity in therapeutic practice.  His example demonstrates that a therapist can share his personal story of pain, loss, illness, shortcoming, struggle, growth, and evolution to light a path for his clients, he can learn from his clients as they learn from him, and the genuine care he feels toward his clients can be openly expressed in a way that has the potential to heal his clients as well as himself.  Because ultimately, all people are social beings, and our relationships with each other leave lasting impacts.

To my pleasant surprise, "Stutz" is a sensitive, thought-provoking, and deft film, leaving me excited to see what else Hill might be capable of.  I gave it a 5.

{Heart}