There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ “See You When I See You.” The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.
The film draws inspiration from the real-life tragedy endured by screenwriter Adam Cayton-Holland, who adapted the screenplay from his memoir, Tragedy Plus Time. (For those who might struggle with math in a conceptual realm, the sum of those two parts is comedy.) Luckily, “See When I See You” has plenty of laughs to offset the complex subject matter of charting a suicide’s aftermath.
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Those come mostly courtesy of star Cooper Raiff, an emergent multihyphenate who feels like a Zillennial descendant of Duplass’ own loquacious house style. Among the Whistler family, he’s both the most and least equipped to handle the loss of its youngest member, Leah (Kaitlyn Dever). Raiff’s Oliver shared such a palpable kinship with his little sister that the dynamic duo frequently got mistaken for lovers rather than siblings or best friends. And as a comedy writer trying to launch a nebulously defined startup, Kumquat, he has an obvious outlet for processing the swirling mix of feelings inside him.
Yet through a mix of substance abuse and shady behavior with an ex-girlfriend (Ariela Barer’s Camilla), who he ghosted after the tragedy, it quickly becomes clear that he needs more professional help to process the events. Raiff has a real talent for seeing through how characters can weaponize their wiles in the name of emotional self-defense. It’s a credit to his rapscallion charm that he can keep Oliver’s antics from depleting an audience’s reserves of sympathy as he resists the treatment he clearly needs.
“See When I See You” works best when it burrows in deep with Oliver’s EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy sessions. It’s here where Duplass transcends the twee trappings of dramedy, of which he indulges plenty with light piano and soft guitar strums. It’s not as provocative as works that take the science of exploring the mind more as their narrative subject, though it goes well beyond a standard tale of unpacking and overcoming tragedy.
In these sequences of wading through the mental morass of PTSD, Duplass’ visual imagination comes alive. Memory becomes malleable as Oliver revisits pivotal moments in his relationship with Leah. The goal of the EMDR process for him, as his therapist describes, is to file away the errant folder of her death in the storage cabinet of his mind.
“See You When I See You” captures the sneaky slipperiness of recalling an event. Most notably, it’s corroded by everything that follows. But memory does not belong solely to the person remembering. If it’s a shared experience, those other people have a say – and may choose to forcefully insert themselves into it, as Oliver’s older sister Emily (Lucy Bonyton) often does.
But the more provocative suggestion of revisiting the sites of his joys and pains with Leah is a confrontation with their inevitable emptiness. The pieces of those experiences went with her, and they will never return. Oliver must discern how he can fill that void with something other than his own sadness.
Duplass has the makings of a good character study when he drills down to focus on Oliver diving into this therapeutic catharsis. And, at times, it wants to be—there are large stretches of the second half where supporting characters drop out for prolonged stretches of the film. But it’s committed to portraying Oliver as just one part of a larger grieving family unit, and to the overall project’s detriment.
The ensemble drama Duplass stages in “See You When I See You” amounts to little more than an ordinary “Ordinary People.” The patriarch, David Duchovny’s Robert, gets little development at all, apart from one scene in which he overshares about losing a child to deflect people’s sympathies. His wife, Hope Davis’ Page, fares little better after discovering a lump in her breast that she tries to keep secret.
The matriarchal figure is reluctant to be a burden at a time of great familial duress, a character trait that Oliver clearly inherits from her. A portion of the narrative seems to place their silent suffering on equal footing, and the echoes between their scenes resound nicely. But then, Cayton-Holland’s script essentially gives up on Page altogether— leaving the ultimate resolution of her health journey to emerge in the film’s epilogue.
At 102 minutes, “See You When I See You” is what passes for long in the world of character-driven original films. But it’s rare for a film to stand to be longer. Scenes far too often play like sketches, mere intimations of what might come. In other words, it’s got the feeling of long-form television, which is where Duplass has concentrated most of his creative energy for the last decade. A standalone feature requires a different narrative economy, one that this only manages to trade in sporadically. [C+]
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