Showtimes & Tickets Enter Zip Code:

THE TREATMENT
Directed by: Oren Rudavsky.
Produced by: Oren Rudavsky & Jonathan Shoemaker.
Written by: Daniel Housman and Oren Rudavsky, based on the novel by Daniel Menaker.
Director of Photography: Andrij Parekh.
Edited by: Ramon Rivera Moret.
Music by: John Zorn.
Country of Origin: USA. 86 minutes. Not Rated.
Released by: New Yorker Films.
With: Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm, Famke Janssen, Harris Yulin, Stephanie March, Blair Brown & Roger Rees.
DVD Features: Deleted scenes. Featurette: Psychotherapists discuss the film. Clips of director’s early works. Theatrical trailer.

The Treatment throws off Woody Allen stereotypes to gently portray the New York City of private schools and psychoanalysts with affection, like an adult version of the similarly delightful Little Manhattan. Jake Singer has lost his girlfriend and some of his idealism as an English teacher, but as portrayed by likable Chris Eigeman, who first made his mark as an Upper East Sider in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, he demonstrates that a mensch doesn’t have to be a nebbish. Teaching the next Masters of the Universe at the fictional but realistic Coventry School, his lessons on Chekhov and Camus have more substance than most literary lessons on film, such as in Richard LaGravenese’s Freedom Writers.

With evocative, warmly lit indoor and outdoor locales, The Treatment’s Manhattan is a city where Julia (Stephanie March), his ex, can ask him, “Are you seeing anybody?” and mean a therapist. The opening animated sequence of a couch flying through the clouds from the Vienna of Freud’s The Ego and the Id to Central Park, accompanied by John Zorn’s sprightly score, establishes a comic platform for Jake’s struggles to improve himself through therapy.

His analyst, the Argentinean Dr. Ernesto Morales, is sternly fed up with his patient’s “disputatious resistance” and “childish insistence on the truth.” Ian Holm adds to his gallery of delicious film characters and accents with this Last Great Freudian who manages to interpret everything in Jake’s life as animalistic sex. Even when Jake quits therapy, his shrink pops in and out of scenes like a hilarious imaginary Super Id explaining Jake’s primal urges.

This mental jack-in-the-closet is particularly awkward for Jake as he begins a relationship with the lovely Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen), a rich, widowed mother of a student. Her seduction of him is a bit less of a male fantasy fulfillment than in Daniel Menaker’s novel. Janssen gives her vulnerability and fragility in dealing with her grief and her baby’s impending adoption, which explains how Jake’s sincerity and decency can attract her. Director Oren Rudavsky and co-writer Daniel Housman judiciously step further from the book’s absurdist finale to humorously keep the characters in credible and sweetly touching family-oriented situations as they mature and gain faith in the future. Just what the doctor ordered. Nora Lee Mandel
September 24, 2007