# Mumford (1999)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com

The premise is simple: Man moves to small Midwestern town that shares his name, pretends to be a psychiatrist, and is actually able to offer better advice than the burg's other two shrinks. His patients are quirky and their characters are well-developed and well-played by capable actors. Yet, somehow, the film really struggles to be even mediocre.

Written and directed by Hollywood vet Lawrence Kasdan (French Kiss), who has a long resume of overly praised middling pictures, Mumford stars Loren Dean (Enemy of the State) as the fraudulent Dr. Mumford. He chose this particular town to set up shop simply because it happened to have the name of the identity he had recently created to avoid a shady past. In town for just a few months, Dr. Mumford has quickly become the mental health M.D. of choice among the Mayberry-esque community, and begins to take clients from the town's other two shrinks.

His patients are almost too quirky to believe. The pharmacist (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Murder One) has steamy sex fantasies straight out of a Russ Meyer flick; a young bulimic goth chick (Zooey Deschanel) says things just for shock value; the wife of a successful financier (Mary McDonnell, 12 Angry Men) is a mail-order shopaholic; and a young lady - and the doctor's obvious eventual love interest – suffers from a case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

The good doctor is also sought by Mumford's richest individual – a young skateboarding techno wiz named Skip Skipperton (Jason Lee, Chasing Amy) who created PandaModem, the town's largest employer and international business that has nabbed 23% of the modem market's share. He's worth 3 billion big ones, but would have traded all of it to make the varsity baseball team. Skip feels he needs psychiatric help, but doesn't want to alarm either his stockholders or the townsfolk, who see PandaModem as a necessity since the timber industry has recently dried up. So he asks Dr. Mumford to pretend to be his friend and dispense therapeutic advice while tossing a football around. Why would such a happy-go-lucky guy need mental help? He's building a synthetic sexual surrogate/companion (read: sex doll) and is afraid that his latest venture could be wrong and dirty.

Things proceed as planned for Dr. Mumford until he tosses new patient and slimy local defense attorney Lionel Dillard (Martin Short) out of a session for being too irritating. Dillard turns to Mumford's other two legit shrinks - Dr. Ernest Delbanco (David Paymer, Payback) and Dr. Phyllis Sheeler (Jane Adams, Happiness) – and suggests that Dr. Mumford may be an uneducated impostor, which leads to an investigation and eventual outing.

Mumford offers precious little that you wouldn't already expect prior to walking into the theater. There is only one real stand-out scene – a great grainy flashback to his previous life and past jobs. Dean is merely adequate - his baked-bean teeth are disturbing and distracting. Lee is totally wasted in a role where he can't curse, able to only either mutter `far out' or repeat someone else's line in question form. The supporting players make the film. Barely. (1:51 - R for sex-related images, language and drug content)

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