There’s a telling moment early on in Beyond Therapy, Robert Altman’s misbegotten 1987 adaptation of the Christopher Durang play, where a wild Bruce (Jeff Goldblum) launches over a dining table at the fancy French restaurant where he and the uptight Prudence (Julie Hagerty) have just met for their first date and begins sucking her toes. This is about five minutes into the movie. As Durang, himself, puts it: “Unpleasant, unlikely to do in a restaurant, and the action told you that you were in a fake world.” “Fake” is a word that can be used to describe almost everything that occurs in Beyond Therapy, a film so wildly divorced from any discernible form of reality that it’s practically impossible to care. Altman, at this point well into his cinematic exile to Paris following the unjust failure of 1980’s Popeye (a good movie – see earlier in this series), was not in the strongest stage of his storied career. Many things that occur within the film do not make sense. Why, for instance, is the story set in New York City if it’s obviously shot in Paris? Is this part of the joke? The film even ends with a zoom-in on the Eiffel Tower, superficially meant as a bit of meta humor – Hagerty has, after all, just informed Goldblum that she’s “never been to Paris.” Like every other joke in the script, it isn’t particularly funny.
Beyond Therapy can loosely be considered a comedy of manners, instigated by Bruce, a bisexual man who meets Hagerty’s Prudence through the personals section of the New York Magazine. He’s already in a relationship with live-in boyfriend Bob (Christopher Guest) but doesn’t seem all too bothered by the notion of blatantly cheating on him with a woman. Prudence, rather inexplicably, is also a blatant homophobe. She openly tells him that she “hates gay people,” and the two proceed to call the date off after throwing water at each other (this is after he’s already sucked her toes). Following this, Bruce and Prudence unknowingly attend therapy sessions in adjoining offices. Prudence’s therapist, Stuart (Tom Conti), is a salacious horndog with whom she’s already had an affair, though she rejects further advances from him due to his issues with premature ejaculation. Meanwhile, Bruce’s shrink, Charlotte (Glenda Jackson) is a scatterbrained eccentric, prone to falling asleep during her patient’s therapy sessions and mixing up words. At some point, Bruce and Prudence accidentally go on another date together (you see, they each wrote new personal ads under separate aliases), and inevitably, these opposites begin to attract. Mostly adrift in the action, Bob internalizes Bruce’s rejection, his rage slowly simmering towards an inescapable blow-up of dramatic proportions.
At the very least, Beyond Therapy feels like an Altman film, meaning his immense skill does occasionally rear its head for one or two inspired moments. It bears all of his stylistic trademarks: the roving camera, the constant overlapping background audio, whimsical background characters, and a general sense of irrepressible chaos that works brilliantly in his best movies. Here however, the best moments come in the rare instances where everyone shuts the hell up. Altman has previously crafted marvelous sequences built on the sudden presence of exquisite quietude – the “I’m Easy” sequence in Nashville or Shelley Duvall’s “He Needs Me” number in Popeye, for instance – but here, they provide a rare salve for the script’s otherwise unbearable smarm. A slow crane shot over Bob and Bruce’s apartment set to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” is well-staged, establishing the character’s environs in a seamless and efficient manner. It’s also hard not to admire Altman’s knack for constructing organized chaos that still somehow feels organic. Even if the narrative fails to impress, some technical ability is still on display.
But Altman has always, deep down, been a humanist filmmaker. This is not a humanist film. Where his finest efforts craft compelling and varied ensembles that invariably develop into genuine, heartfelt individuals, none of the characters here feel like actual people. Prudence is an absurd collection of nervous ticks and unexplainable bigotry, whilst Bruce almost seems like a borderline sociopath. One of the movie’s running jokes is that he carries a tear stick that he uses to generate fake tears whenever he’s insulted. Who does this? Why would you do this? The character seems designed to punish anyone who would root for him. He’s horrible to his boyfriend, antagonistic to his ill-matched lover, and all-around an inexplicable creation from page to screen. The only reason he’s not completely unbearable to watch is because Jeff Goldblum is one of the most likable actors alive. Guest, the hilarious actor and mastermind behind classic comedies like This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show, doesn’t have much to do except play a caricature. The film is arguably somewhat homophobic in its handling of its gay characters, using them as punchlines for attempts at edgy, slur-driven humor. One gets the sense that Altman was attempting a satire of gender roles, each of his characters representing unstable notions of the behavior expected of men and women. This commentary, apparent as it may be, is overshadowed by the crass humor of Altman’s bafflingly problematic script.
Durang has called the adaptation a “very unhappy experience and outcome,” which seems reasonable given how the end product turned out. Both he and Altman receive credit for the script (mostly because some chunks of Durang’s play remain intact), but the script is chiefly the latter’s. There’s a lot going on at once. Characters move manically in and out of scenes, inexplicably meeting under unlikely and contrived circumstances. Almost every background extra is comically bizarre, closer to those of Popeye than Nashville. This is a film for Altman completionists only, an unfortunate and only sporadically enjoyable curiosity that wasn’t terribly well-liked in 1987 and certainly isn’t terribly well-liked now. Luckily, a positive career-turn was just around the corner for the auteur, hitting a renewed stride in the coming decade. As for Beyond Therapy, it’s beyond saving.
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