The Treatment Movie Review

Co-writer, co-producer, and director Oren Rudavsky must have really loved the novel The Treatment. I'd wager anything he has his own issues with psychotherapy going on. Alas, good intentions and a fondness for source material do not a great movie make. And while The Treatment has its moments, it's on the whole a little flat.

The film revolves around a highschool teacher (a rather haggard-looking Chris Eigeman) who's so deep into therapy that Dr. Ernesto Morales (Ian Holm) basically runs his life. A chance encounter with one of the school's bankrollers (Famke Janssen) turns his thoughts to love. When she is revealed to be a widow and single mother, though, things get a little tricky.

The first half of the movie plays for awkward laughs, but by the 50-minute mark things have degenerated into a quest for Janssen's Allegra to try and keep an adopted baby, though rules stipulate she has to have a full-time partner. As well, Holm's analyst appears more frequently as a kind of apparition, attempting to control Eigeman's every move. With both threads gone haywire, the film just kind of stops, having run out of gas.

Janssen scoots by here on her natural charm, but even though I'm an enormous fan of Eigeman, his equally natural charm doesn't offer enough oomph to carry the film. Or maybe it's Rudavsky (virtually all of whose many prior credits are documentaries about Judaism) who just doesn't have enough of a handle on how to tell a compelling story (you know: beginning, middle, end). Valiant effort, but someone should have begged for a rewrite.