Stutz - A Documentary Recommendation
On long-distance calls back to Canada from Japan, I used to try and convey what little I had learned of Buddhism to my poor mother. A world-class listener, she had both the patience and the genuine curiosity to sincerely try to understand my pathetic attempts to convey my rudimentary understanding of a religion, of a philosophy about as deep as the Marian Trench. Where my mother got stuck was at the “life is suffering” bit. She’d say to me, “But darling” (what my South African-born mother called all her children) “I just … I can’t quite see how that isn’t, kind of, despairing.” I’m paraphrasing. I don’t remember her words exactly. But that was the gist. The daughter of an optimist so legendary in my family that both my daughter and one of my nieces are named after my famous grandmother, my mom was far from a cynic. She simply found a religion founded on the idea that “life is suffering” as not the most hopeful of notions, and I was utterly lacking in the ability to articulate why I thought it was actually quite hopeful.
I don’t know that I can articulate it any better today, all these years later. But watching Jonah Hill’s tender, timely and just straight fucking beautiful documentary, Stutz, about his shrink (Dr Phil Stutz) now on Netflix, brought me back to that seeming contradiction. How could accepting the hardest truths of what life actually is equal hope or faith or anything positive at all?
Dr. Phil Stutz is the kind of terribly grounded man to never need to be referred to as a doctor, or so I imagine. The type well aware of the harshness of life. He is not one to hide his head in the sand. This psychiatrist who has been practicing in Hollywood for decades to some of the biggest names in the business it seems, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s (the same disease that would afflict and kill my father, as it happens), but Phil was diagnosed not in his early sixties like my dad was, but in his early twenties. He is in his mid-seventies now. And while his body is so often outside of his control, as he cannot hide in the film, this is a man who does a hundred pushups over the course of each day (it helps loosen up his body that so often gets tight, he explains). He also clearly has moves on a basketball court. Not to mention his mind. What a mind! Stutz is the very definition of with it: he is present and clear and whip-smart in ways the average overachieving graduate student would kill to be. He can also match wits with the likes of Jonah Hill. Consider that.
So here we’ve got a practicing psychiatrist who has been fighting a brutal dengernative neurological disorder for fifty years(!), presumably for the entirety of his career. He is the last to throw himself a “pity party” as Jonah Hill puts it. If the Parkinson’s diagnosis weren’t enough, Stutz lost his little brother when the doctor was just nine-years-old. His brother was three when he died. It destroyed his parents. And yet to see who this psychiatrist has become, the presumably hundreds of people he has helped (Jonah Hill is the only ‘name’ given in the film that he treats, but I wonder if it is coincidence that both Joaquin Phoenix and his partner Rooney Mara are producers of the documentary), Stutz has devoted himself and given. He’s done so much, including two books he’s written (one of which I’ve already ordered from the library to read). There isn’t time for self-pity.
One of many lessons Jonah Hill’s doc provides us of Stutz's philosophy in treating his patients has to do with what the doctor refers to as the three “aspects of reality”. Three aspects Stutz assures us “that no one can avoid”. They are:
pain;
uncertainty; and
constant hard work
Sounds a lot like suffering to me. And yet coming from this inveterate optimist, who as it turns out has quite the potty mouth—he can f-bomb with the best of ‘em, and again he’s sitting across a table from Jonah Hill no less!—it is all about making forward progress. It’s about having hope. Finding hope. Overcoming anguish, depression, the usual things that send us to therapy.
The documentary has heart, smarts, wisdom. It’s a panacea for all the dark clouds above us these days. Above those thick clouds, Stutz assures us, is the sun. It always is. You’ll understand what I mean when you see the film.
I highly recommend it.
xo