Jimmy P.

In the late 1940s, at the progressive Menninger Clinic, two mavericks bonded, not simply as therapist and patient, but as friends united by their personal experiences as outsiders. Arnaud Desplechin’s extraordinarily intelligent and moving adaptation of Georges Devereux’s landmark work of ethnographic psychoanalysis stars Benicio Del Toro as the titular Jimmy P., a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran suffering from what initially seems like severe post-traumatic stress, and Mathieu Amalric as Devereux, a Hungarian Jew who reinvented himself many times over before coming to the U.S. to study Mohave Indian culture. Both actors are at the top of their game and their interaction makes the best case for the “Talking Cure” ever depicted in a fiction film. An NYFF51 selection.