The Shrinking Shrink

Normally, Joe is a psychiatrist. But Joe is no longer normal. In order to heal himself, he holes up in a strange pad, assumes a fresh identity and films his sexual and spiritual agonies in a voyeur's version of Candid Camera. The analyst analyzed, the schizoid psyche caught flagrante delicto--it is a notion worthy of Pirandello or Antonioni. And totally beyond Milton Moses Ginsberg, neophyte writer-director of Coming Apart.

At the start, Ginsberg shows a flicker of humor--which is more than can be said for his actors. When Joe (Rip Torn) tells a masochistic nymph that "there are only two or three ways," she volunteers brightly: "I could talk to a friend on the phone while you're doing it to me." Joe mulls it over. "About what?" he asks.

But after the masochist has been properly dissatisfied ("You're raping me," she cries during his listless love-making), the film plummets. Playing host to a series of grotesques, Joe loses an ill-played game of hostility to some erstwhile girl friends. The battle of the exes ranges from shallow youth (Sally Kirkland) to callow middle age (Viveca Lindfors), and includes, in the interim: a toothsome baby sitter; a campaign worker for Eugene McCarthy (is nothing sacred?); a scholarly type who mumbles "I read your paper . . . It's very impressive" as she's being undressed; and a transvestite, presumably added to assure the widest possible audience appeal. Finally Psychiatrist Torn comes apart from his pregnant wife and his sterile life.

Manifestly, Ginsberg intends his static film to be a set of X rays. Instead it is only a suite of poses. Even the nude sex scenes are filmed in a chiaroscuro that shows far more scuro than chiaro. As does the script. Ginsberg begins with a Pascal epigraph, but on his own he produces bromides: "Why am I telling you all this?"; "I hate men, they degrade you for being a female"; "I crave nothingness . . . not to die, to live! To become! To find myself!" The stars complement the dialogue. The shrink should be dosed with adrenaline; Torn plays him as if he were shot with Novocain. Sally Kirkland, the Susan B. Anthony of the new nudity, mercilessly displays a Vogueish figure that looks more erotic dressed than undressed. Viveca Lindfors, like her fellow supporting players, adopts the familiar rock musicians' motto: Loud is Good.

Physical nakedness is performed by most people twice a day. Mental stripping is far rarer--a feat beyond the reach of any but the extremely gifted or courageous.

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