Jimmy P.

Jimmy P. (2013) is an Arnaud Desplechin drama you can watch online on iFILM, with Benicio del Toro and Mathieu Amalric in the leads. Two men talk for most of the film, and everything grows out of those conversations.

Jimmy Picard is a Blackfoot soldier who came home after fighting in France in the mid-1940s. Headaches, dizzy spells, stretches of blindness plague him, yet no physical cause turns up, and the hospital leans toward calling it schizophrenia. Then an unusual analyst named Georges Devereux — an anthropologist by training, stubborn and a little odd — takes the case and proposes listening instead of labeling. Day after day he asks Jimmy about his dreams, his childhood on the reservation, the war, and it slowly becomes clear that the wound isn't in the body.

The screenplay was drawn from Devereux's own book about this patient, and Desplechin films it gently, without melodramatic push. It's slow, deliberate cinema for anyone who values a two-hander and the quiet weight of talk over plot twists. Stream Jimmy P. (2013) online on iFILM.