Educational Media Reviews Online

“Empathy is a form of observation…one uses to understand the patient” notes an apparently genuine psychotherapist in Empathy, an awkward blend of documentary and dramatic feature. I say “apparently” because we’re never really sure who the real actors and therapists are in this self-conscious intellectual exercise, and unfortunately that seems to be the point. Or one of the points. There are lots of points in Empathy, but little plot.

The film consists of video interviews with therapists intercut with narrative film footage of a character named Lia (Gigi Buffington), an actress in psychoanalysis who is also playing a character named Jennifer Scott James. Her story is further contrasted with screen tests of actress auditioning for the role of Lia. Inserted in the middle of all this is a mini-documentary – narrated by Lia -- about the relationship between psychiatry and modernist architecture; this documentary is actually the best part of Empathy.

Much of the film seems like a series of in-jokes aimed at therapists or patients. The architecture documentary, for example, features an interview with a therapist who pontificates while breast-feeding her infant on camera.(!) In similar tongue-in-cheek manner, several therapists pause during interviews to remove back-support pillows from their chairs, to answer patient calls, or to light pipes. Throughout the film, they are asked a series of supposedly provocative questions - “Do you ever lie to patients?”, “How is therapy different than prostitution?”, “Is the analytic profession voyeuristic?” - but the answers aren’t very interesting, coming as they do from therapists who are variously clinical, guarded, arrogant, or defensive.

Empathy plays like a psychology graduate student’s “alternative” thesis, a film full of ideas but lacking the dramatic essentials - conflict, plot, goal - necessary to embody the ideas compellingly for the layperson. It’s as if the film exists solely as a springboard to big-D Discussion, or worse, as the pretext for a filmmaker interview in which we can be told What Everything Means. The various notions explored - filmmaker as therapist, actors as liars, etc - could be intriguing if handled properly, but without an effective structure they quickly wear thin. Therapists and patients might find the film amusing or interesting, but the rest of us are left with 93 minutes of talking-head material that could have been sufficiently covered in 30. Slow-going, and sporting a hefty price tag, Empathy is not recommended.