Critics reviews

Many reviews of the film criticized the slow dialogue scenes between Jimmy and Devereux, in which the patient provides the therapist with details of his personal history and medical treatment. I consider them to be the film's most daring invention. These scenes don't advance the story in a traditional sense—they deepen our understanding of the subject and the extraordinary historical conditions that brought him to this point.

The talky, static quality of Jimmy P., along with its general tone of minimizing racism through small acts of understanding, makes Jimmy P. resemble a conscious throwback to the social-problem films of the 1940s and 50s. Even in the choice of leads -- Del Toro the perennial hangdog, Amalric the twitching bundle of energy -- Desplechin has arranged a sort of verbal / visual shorthand for liberal dialectics, men from radically different walks of life coming together and learning from one another.

Once their mannered acting styles get enough time to settle, Del Toro and Amalric—the former doing a deliberately stilted, sluggishly contemplative approximation of a Native American with modern English as a second language, the latter playing an experimental professional with a history of underemployment whose new gig with Jimmy inspires a shock of giddy compassion that never subsides until their final separation—are a mesmerizing duo.

The mere description of the movie (a title at the start of which declares, "This is a true story") suggests the remarkably complex interweave of subjects and themes that flow through it: war, religion, exile, colonial politics, the American West, the medical mystery, and, of course, psychoanalysis itself—which brings in its wake the skein of personal, emotional, and familial experiences that it unravels.

Desplechin adopts an American identity just as Devereux/Dobó adopts a French one: if the film has a certain formal sobriety that at times approaches academicism, that's because Desplechin seems to be aiming at a certain American cinema, of the simple, formal, somewhat monolithic kind best represented by recent Clint Eastwood films such as Changeling. His aim, in short, which he pulls off pretty honorably, could not be more French—to make un grand film américain.

Here is what you _really_ need to know about "Jimmy P." First, the movie offers the most psychologically complex screen portrait of a Native American character in at least twenty years, probably more. Second, and related: the titular Indian—Jimmy Picard, a Blackfoot and war veteran who seeks treatment for headaches and catatonia at a facility in Kansas—is played by Benecio del Toro, in one of his greatest performances.

In many respects, Jimmy P. feels like an argument being made by proponents of therapy who want to demonstrate how the process ideally works. The film is nearly devoid of the sense of mystery and wonder that usually permeates Desplechin's work, and features only a meager handful of his signature expressionistic interludes (notably, as in Kings & Queen,the unexpectedly emotional reading of a letter).

Respectably, French auteur Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale) introduces Freud to Sisyphus with this bone-dry yet oddly absorbing procedural... Amalric's impish dexterity and Del Toro's mild catatonia make for a memorable mismatch, but Jimmy P.'s profound slow burn might be too clinical for some to consider dramatic.

Arnaud Desplechin's two-hander (based on an actual case and coscripted by NYFF programmer Kent Jones) plays more like David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method than the schmaltzy Awakenings, building a quiet compassion that takes second place to an unlikely cross-cultural exchange. The explosive, messy complexity of Desplechin's prior triumphs Kings & Queen and A Christmas Tale is tamped down somewhat—a shame—but the director finds a route to his signature motif: talking out the pain.

The transition between mediums [book to film] is surprisingly smooth. (Much of this is down to the film's fluid, intelligent screenplay, which Desplechin co-wrote with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones.) At its best, Jimmy P is a chance to see two terrific actors [Del Toro and Amalric] propose two very different strategies for working through—and with—language.

The burden of the narrative rests on the restorative nature of this procedure, and while there's never any melodrama affixed to it, the beats are rote and expected, as is the conversation attached to them. This means that Arnaud Desplechin's film grows increasingly dull as it beats a cautious path toward Jimmy's recovery, resorting to Psych 101 imagery and monotonous dream sequences, all of which lead to the usual breakthroughs...

This is a superb, engrossing picture, strange in all the right ways, and I long to see it again.Jimmy P. is based on Devereaux's book Reality and Dream, and though the picture is very much unlike any movie Desplechin has made before (aside from the fact that it's the fifth time he and Amalric have worked together), it shows the Desplechin touch—it's structured in a way that feels slightly meandering, though by the end, the main characters' inner lives have drifted into clear focus.