It wouldn’t be difficult to build a case against Shrink. It’s glossy. It’s maudlin. It’s self-referential: an L.A. movie about L.A. celebrities and how unhappy they are. It can’t find the bottom of the cheese barrel and its deus ex machina will insult your intelligence. Most infuriatingly, though, this dark comedy about addiction, anomie, and the wages of privilege totally works.
Kevin Spacey stars as Henry Carter, a puffy, scruffy therapist to the stars and bestselling self-help author who is lying at the bottom of his own psychological pool. He’s a profoundly lonely man with a dead wife, a clientele of A-list weasels, and an impressive pot habit. He smokes his way through the day and eventually loses consciousness on his couch, on his deck, in his car—anywhere but his bed. For Dr. Carter, it is easier to pass out than to fall asleep.
He’s surrounded by a kaleidoscope of shallow but entertaining L.A. caricatures: the vicious agent with OCD (a perfectly snarling Dallas Roberts), an aspiring screenwriter with writer’s block (Mark Webber), a philandering and alcoholic actor (Robin Williams), an actress confronting her age in a business that feeds on youth (Saffron Burrows), and so on. They’re all one degree of separation apart, passing through Dr. Carter’s life and lobby, their butts warming the therapist’s couch for one another. And they are redeemed, as they must be, by an underprivileged African-American girl (Keke Palmer) who Dr. Carter sees pro bono after she punches a mirror in her high-school bathroom. She is reticent and wary (of course). She and the depressed doctor form a bond (of course). They help each other (of course).
The plot devices are pat and sometimes ridiculous, but Shrink is all about acting and the acting is superb. Spacey unobtrusively fills the film with his usual understated richness. The first time we see Dr. Carter, he’s waking from another bout of self-administered anesthesia—he sits up, lights a joint, and exhales, his baleful, basset-hound eyes glancing upward with the look of a man who knows he’s in trouble. For the next 100 minutes, he and the rest of the cast gently tug us down into the muck of their lives: addictions, neuroses, unhappy marriages, glass ceilings, anxiety. If you’ve ever had a problem, someone in Shrink has it, too. Which is part of the film’s genius: There’s a little crazy for everyone. 
Producers sitting at a table: How can we tell America that even though we all make insane amounts of money for small amounts of work, that small amount of work is harder than the job you have that we’ve mocked a thousand times before, and all that money we have can’t buy us happiness, but we still need it, so everyone telling us we’re all pathetic because all we do is smoke tons of pot, waste all our money and preach as though we’re curing diseases, y’all bitches can shove it. Gosh, it’s like people don’t think we have the same problems they do. I mean they’re on the cover of nearly every magazine at the grocery store…and all over the news…and blogs…and everywhere…but it just isn’t enough. So here’s another movie about how lowly we all are. Dude you got any pot? Who should write this? I like that screenplay Edmunds wrote, but it doesn’t involve any of us and there were some themes that were anti-extreme left-wing. That isn’t going to help anyone. Fuck I’m stoned. Let’s brainstorm with American Beauty. Pull out your pens. Oh, Brian…I see you went to the Sheraton…pov! HAHAHA birthday joke! Hazaa.
The movie had 10 good lines, the rest was banal, frustrating, trite, predictable and ultimately disappointing, given the exceptional cast.