An Idiosyncratic Healer From Abroad Soothes a Troubled Indian

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/arts/21iht-dupont21.html

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CANNES — Arnaud Desplechin, whose first appearance at the Cannes festival was in 1991, is competing this year with a movie that has deep French and American roots. Shot in English, “Jimmy P., Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” is based on a book by Georges Devereux, an early French psychotherapist, about an American Indian veteran of World War II.

“Isn’t it a strange story?” said Mr. Desplechin. “An encounter between two men who are worlds apart. When they meet at the clinic, each has traveled across the country, Jimmy from Montana — three days by train — and Devereux from New York. They are both in exile.”

The film is about the pioneering days of psychoanalysis. Benicio Del Toro plays Jimmy, a Blackfoot Indian who has returned from war with debilitating symptoms; brain injury is suspected, then schizophrenia.

Mathieu Amalric, who has appeared in most of Mr. Desplechin’s films, sometimes as his alter ego, plays the healer from abroad, a doctor who has plenty of idiosyncrasies.

“In a way, it’s the case of the worst analyst and the worst patient meeting,” Mr. Desplechin said. “Since Devereux was a beginner he wasn’t accepted or trusted at first at the clinic. He was given one patient. And since he was bored, he wrote everything down. Even Freud made a digest of his cases. So we have the whole story.”

When Jimmy arrives, he is an enigma to the doctors. They examine him, take X-rays, make a few diagnostic jabs, but only Devereux, who is fascinated by Indians and their culture, can get inside his head.

In his first scenes as the doctor from abroad, Mr. Amalric doesn’t stint on special effects — with plenty of tics — but under Mr. Desplechin’s guidance he grows into a rich figure.

“First off, Mathieu said, ‘Devereux looks like a quack; he’s too bizarre,”’ Mr. Desplechin said. “But then, we see how fast he gets to the right place; there are lots of scenes in which he listens, and a psychoanalyst’s listening is different from the way we listen: Something strong comes from that.”

As for the doctor’s evolution, it is reflected in the film: He gets rid of his tics, he enjoys a visit from a girlfriend, played by Gina McKee, and when she leaves to go back to Europe he gets down to work.

Another dimension seems to open up in the film, moving from a focus on the physical to plumbing the deepest recesses of the characters’ minds. Howard Shore’s music, a throbbing score, which has echoes of a 1940s melodrama, floats through the film.

The director says that once he wrote the script, with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones, he could picture only Mr. Amalric in the part of Devereux. Casting Jimmy was more difficult.

“I saw lots of films, I really did research,” he said, “but I didn’t find the actor with the charisma I needed. I saw many who played victims, such as Adam Beach, who was in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ but it wasn’t my story; it was the story of a victim.” Then he recalled seeing Mr. Del Toro in Sean Penn’s movie “The Pledge,” in which he had a small part.

“Benicio isn’t a native American, of course (he is from Puerto Rico), but he’s had the life of a non-Caucasian actor: You see it,” Mr. Desplechin said. “I love what Benicio does; he’s massive, so big. I was thinking of a tragic character and think Jimmy is close to a Thomas Hardy character; he’s out of a Hardy novel. He has no men in his life, only women — his sister, mother, daughter. When he falls down drunk, the nurses can’t pick him up, but this little man — Devereux, his doctor — picked him up.”

Mr. Desplechin shot the film in Michigan, with an American crew. “There were only three of us who were French,” he said. The countryside of Jimmy’s reservation was filmed in Montana.

In the film, we see Jimmy’s life in flashback as he recounts it to Devereux, and how, even as he improves, away from home he is lost, out of his element in a hospital with good doctors and smiling nurses.

“He is sick and his analyst is a bit lost: They evolve together,” Mr. Desplechin said.

The movie was inspired by “Reality and Dream,” Devereux’s book about his treatment of James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian he met at a clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

“There is a sentence from the book about needing sufficient empathy for a psychoanalysis to work,” Mr. Desplechin said. “This is the story of a friendship, and strange as it may seem, but for a psychoanalysis to work there has to be real friendship — there are very few films about friendship.”

“Usually in movies, the psychoanalyst knows everything,” Mr. Desplechin added. “I preferred to make a study of self-portraits, two lives that cross.”

Devereux had a big love life, and a passion for American Indian history; the analysis wouldn’t have worked without these factors.

“It’s curious,” Mr. Desplechin said. “He was a European Jew who wanted to get rid of his identity and be buried with the Mohave, but he wants the Native American to be proud of his origins. Is freedom about being identified with your origins, or not?”

The filmmaker, who comes from northern France, has often focused on French family life, with movies like “Rois et Reine.”

“Yes, I am very French,” he said. “And I thought that social medicine was a French story, a European privilege. But in the story of this postwar clinic, thanks to social medicine and the war, you have a special situation, with two characters and a complete psychoanalysis. In 1945 they had everything at the Topeka clinic, but they hadn’t thought of psychiatry, and 65 percent of the veterans were mentally injured.”

He says he was touched to see, through the story of Jimmy, a story of America and how people believed they could build a country together.

After the analysis, Jimmy didn’t return to the reservation. “He became American,” Mr. Desplechin said.

And Devereux ended their work together with the succinct line, “We had a good talk tonight.”

“It must have been strange to have lived in the head of somebody for so long,” the director said.