Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson Square Off In FX’s Riveting Psychothriller The Patient: Review
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The post Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson Square Off In FX’s Riveting Psychothriller The Patient: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: Psychotherapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell) is a man in the grips of mourning — not just for the recent loss of his wife (Laura Niemi) to cancer, but also for his strained relationship with his son Ezra (Andrew Leeds), whose choice to become an Orthodox Jew has drawn a deep rift against his more liberal Jewish father.
But Alan receives the challenge of a lifetime in the form of Sam Fortner (Domhnall Gleeson), a new patient who seems cagey, mysterious, and unable to truly open up. Turns out, that’s because Sam is a serial killer, one desperately searching for a way to stamp out his compulsions, and he hopes that Alan’s expertise can help.
In classic serial-killer fashion, that means kidnapping Alan, chaining him to the basement of his mother’s remote house out in the woods, and forcing him to conduct session after session to work out the root of Sam’s murderous impulses. Complicating things further, his long-suffering mother Candace (Linda Emond) knows about Sam’s compulsions, but refuses to do anything to compromise her son’s freedom.
It’s a game of survival for Alan, one rooted in his desire to live as much as it is to see Sam change his ways. And in the meantime, he gets plenty of time among takeout meals and long stretches of isolation to think about his own grief, his relationship to Judaism, and whether he can escape his makeshift prison on his own. Then again… what if he can make Sam better?
Analyze This: Therapy has long been a fertile field for drama in film and television; take one character with heaps of conflict and mash them against a dispassionate third party whose job it is to get under their skin and reveal their hidden motivations/fears/hopes. You’ve got tremendous potential for narrative catharsis.
But The Patient ups the ante by giving its therapist character skin in the game — not only does Alan have to just keep talking to survive till the next day, he’s deeply concerned for Sam’s future victims (Sam’s eyeing a Greek restaurant employee who treated him like crap at his job as a restaurant inspector for his next target). Most intriguingly, Alan also holds out the slimmest hope that maybe, just maybe, he can actually change Sam for the better, and it’s that hope that strings together much of The Patient‘s narrative momentum.
The Patient (FX/Hulu)
Despite originally breaking out as a comedian, Carell is no stranger to drama, and he infuses Alan with no small amount of droll world-weariness. With his big, bushy beard, thick cable-knit cardigan, and quiet, exacting demeanor, he’s the quintessential therapist, even when existential fear seizes him by the bones.
Carell plays these moments of fragile rationality quite well, putting up the facade of professional detachment even when he’s fighting for his life. Writers Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg grant him more than a few moments of frustration and anger, even as he keeps it inside, personified through mind-palace discussions with his late therapist, Charlie (David Alan Grier), who prods him to interrogate his own motivations for helping the boy.
As for Sam himself, Gleeson plays him with all the glassy-eyed emptiness of a boy lost to abuse and his own sociopathic impulses. In lesser hands, it’d be easy for Sam to fall into pernicious stereotypes of psychopaths having the earmarks of autism — the difficulty in reading social cues, the flat affect, the fixation on niche interests like Kenny Chesney and exotic takeout food.
But Gleeson manages to weave in a small, tragic amount of humanity, a feeling of helplessness that fuels his killing — he knows he needs to stop, but doesn’t know how. He’s a monster, to be sure, but these glimpses give Alan (and the viewer) hope that somehow, this time, things will turn out differently.
Man’s Search for Meaning: Much as they did on their work for FX’s incredible The Americans, Weisberg and Fields play deviously with the moral ambiguity of their characters, with no small strain of black humor peppered in from time to time. Sam’s insistence on playing out their forced therapy sessions like any other trip to Alan’s practice is innately funny (“I know this sucks,” he offers when Alan first wakes up in his wood-paneled prison), and Carell shines when he indulges in Alan’s particular strain of gallows humor.
Sometimes The Patient stumbles on its own ambition, especially as the series progresses and we learn more about these characters. Alan’s relationship to Judaism is a major thematic underpinning of the show: his grief for his wife is tied to her role as her synagogue’s sunny, inviting cantor, not to mention his son’s retreat into the strict tenets of Orthodox practices (which he not-so-secretly holds in contempt).
As he contemplates his fate, dreams and images of the Holocaust recur in his mind, even imagining himself meeting renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl in Auschwitz. His imprisonment is as much a crisis of faith as a fight to live another day, which is fascinating (even as the imagery gets a bit heavy-handed in the later stretches).
The Patient (FX/Hulu)
The same depth, unfortunately, can’t be extended to Sam, whose psychopathy is frustratingly ill-explored apart from a quickly-established history of physical abuse on the part of his father — and the strong implication that his mother did little to prevent the abuse from happening. When we do see him outside the therapeutic context, he seeks refuge in his creature comforts (including, amusingly, trying to search for porn and thinking of nothing more elaborate than “big tits”) and a misplaced sense of justice that informs his rapport with his workmates.
In this way, Weisberg and Fields keep him mysterious, which certainly helps keep the viewer on the back foot in terms of Alan’s progress with him. But we come away from The Patient feeling like we know much more about Alan than we do his charge/captor.
The Verdict: While it’s occasionally hobbled by hokey presentationalism and no small amount of contrivance, there’s something riveting about the moment-to-moment suspense of The Patient. Both Carell and Gleeson are turning in handsome work, threading that delicate needle between psychothriller danger and pitch-black comedy; as a two-hander actor’s showcase, it succeeds mightily.
And there’s the central philosophical question at work, too: Can a serial killer be reformed by therapy, especially therapy conducted under life-threatening duress? What’s more, can the hope of success blind you to more fundamental questions of survival? When The Patient keeps its focus on its central pair and simply lets their perversely intriguing dynamic play out, it’s fantastic television.
Where’s It Playing? The Patient starts its first session on Hulu August 30th, with episodes running weekly after that.
Trailer:
Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson Square Off In FX’s Riveting Psychothriller The Patient: Review
Clint Worthington
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