Mumford

In movies, complex problems usually warrant simple-minded solutions, and few directors are readier with a platitude than Lawrence Kasdan. The facile approach he has displayed to life's imponderable in The Big Chill and Grand Canyon continues in the bland, limp, lubricious Mumford.

Loren Dean looks as if he'd lost his way from Walton's Mountain as the therapist of the title, a mystery man who wanders into a town, also called Mumford, and through his common sense, knack for listening, and blank smile sets many of the citizens' troubled psyches to rest, including a number of invidious female stereotypes -- an anorectic teenager (Zooey Deschanel), a shopaholic ditz (Mary McDonnell), a depressive nudge (Hope Davis). Mumford's treatment? An appropriate male partner. As Davis's character confesses, what she's needed all along was a man just like him. McDonnell is more blunt -- she's looking for a good "shtup."

Mumford has secrets of his own, as revealed in a bizarre mid-film flashback and an Unsolved Mysteries broadcast. But despite the efforts of three malevolent females -- a rival psychologist, a termagant mother, and a draconian judge -- his brand of facile and unethical pop psychology prevails. Maybe Kasdan might check with his own therapist about his woman complex, or at least learn the correct definition of "transference." At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, and Showcase cinemas.
-- Peter Keough