Unlike last year's similarly undercirculated film chronicling the interconnecting lives of several people in the Hollywood film biz, 'What Just Happened,' 'Shrink' succeeds in dismantling the barrier between characters and audiences.
The film's main character, Doctor Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey), is just one of several that manages to slowly earn your compassion. Kevin Spacey has always done an excellent job playing Kevin Spacey, but his role as Carter gives him a slightly larger emotional gamut to run, making it his best of the decade.
The rest of the cast (including a seldom seen Saffron Burrows and an unusually placed Robin Williams) complements the core crux of Spacey's character, especially Dallas Roberts' Patrick, an eccentric agent.
As the film plays out, it seems as though it will have a hard time wrapping up all of the sub- plots in introduces, as the list of important characters is relatively long. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case and is perhaps the only noteworthy flaw of 'Shrink' (a big flaw, however).
That said, even if you walk out wanting a little more from one or more characters, you'll still walk about thinking about them all, as each is memorable in his or her humanity.
The New York Times review suggests that some of the characters are a little too "sketchy" and the plot somewhat "contrived," but with a lot of films, those criticisms are a little misleading. To vehemently endorse realism is to take away from what makes these characters so relatable. If some character skeletons have become cliché, it's because audiences connect with those clichés. And, at the end of the day, while 'Shrink' is probably a more than slightly inaccurate portrayal of the world and characters it presents, that inaccuracy doesn't matter when you empathize with those characters.
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