Film

A depressed psychiatrist (Spacey), whose clientele is mainly big celebrities, starts his day by toking some serious weed to numb the obvious emotional pain. A teen (Palmer) grieving the loss of her mother smashes in a bathroom mirror. A screenwriter (Webber) sits in front of a laptop battling writer’s block. A hyped-up Hollywood agent (Roberts) has anxiety attacks between aggressive phone calls. Echo-ey guitar keens on the soundtrack. Lives intersect, unlikely friendships are formed, old wounds are probed. Everyone, and we mean everyone, gets a scene in which to cry. Let the healing begin.

It’s not hard to see why actors go for projects like this. Spacey gets to play stoned and do the whole “shrink who can’t deal with his own problems” routine. It’s actor catnip, and Spacey looks as if he’s partaken heavily, wallowing around in the character’s emotions. Everyone else mopes very prettily, but we’re given very little reason to care about their formulaic personal crises. Thomas Moffett’s script relies on wildly implausible coincidences to keep these pinball characters bouncing off each other. And there’s a distinct feeling of Hollywood solipsism in a movie in which characters solve emotional problems by turning real pain into a screenplay.