Judd Hirsch played a good enough psychiatrist in the film Ordinary People. Richard Dreyfus was painfully funny in What About Bob. But lately, my favorite movie shrink is the little known Dr. Drayton, in What Lies Beneath.
Robert Zemeckis' 1999 movie What Lies Beneath was a poorly received thriller with a supernatural streak. Claire and Norman Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford) are struggling with their marriage, lost dreams, and a big remodeling job on their gorgeous old house. Norman sends Claire to a psychiatrist because she is beset with anxiety, hearing whispers, acting increasingly paranoid, and seeing ghostly visions.
Joe Morton has a brief part playing Dr Drayton, Claire's laid-back psychiatrist. But in their few minutes on screen together, cinema doctor and cinema patient do a lot for shrink PR. They're face to face and meeting for the first time. In a spare performance, Morton conveys a calm acceptance, a useful curiosity, and most of all an ability to attend humanely to his new patient's discomfort.
Claire starts out her session saying she didn't want to come. Dr. Drayton patiently and nonintrusively questions her about her anxiety. Close to opening up, she grabs her face and says, “Why is this so hard?”
Here's the great moment Dr. Drayton smiles gently and leans forward a little, picks up a bowl next to his chair and says, “Here, have a fireball.” OK, questionable technique, needs to be analyzed later and all that, but what a terrific instant of connection.
I hadn't thought of fireballs for forty years or so. In case you don't know what they are, or have forgotten, Atomic Fireballs (their official name, from Ferrara Pan, the candy company that manufactures them) are extremely hard candies that are so loaded with cinnamon they make your mouth hurt and so hard that you have to choose between sucking forever or risk cracking a tooth by biting into one. Yet they are intensely pleasurable. What an exquisite metaphor for analysis.
The patient relaxes a little, and the therapist says, “It's hard because I'm a complete stranger and you're talking about things that are incredibly personal.” Dr. Drayton was human, and more interested in the patient than himself. I'm thinking of getting some fireballs for my office.
—Prudy Gourguechon