Jonas Pate's Shrink is a shallow, self-involved exercise in moping. Ensemble dramas don't get more stultifying than this, as a half-dozen characters with ties to Hollywood wallow in their own beautiful grief, luxurious excesses, and pretty flaws. Shrink is founded on the idea that the characters are more interesting because they're celebrities, but that's really just an excuse for writer Thomas Moffett to drape overblown character traits on ciphers. Interestingly, the film's most false character is probably the one who strikes Moffett and Pate as the most true -- a delinquent teenage girl played by Keke Palmer. She's acting out because her mother committed suicide, but how she acts out is the bogus part -- she skips school to watch classic movies in the theater. Movies like Fargo, which are notable for probably having influenced the filmmakers, not for actually having played theatrically after their initial run. This is one example of how Shrink, disguised as a contemplation of emotional pain, is really just a way for the filmmakers to congratulate themselves and other aspiring Hollywood types on their chosen career path. Movies can heal all ills, right? Even while ostensibly condemning the misbehavior of familiar archetypes -- the rock-star director who parties too hard, the sex-addicted movie star, the agent spitting obscenities into his Bluetooth -- Pate is really just reinforcing our collective notion of Hollywood's glamorous sleaziness, which we find compelling in spite of ourselves. That he thinks he's doing something more profound is Pate's greatest form of naïveté. If Palmer's character is the film's most artificial, then Kevin Spacey's is the most insufferable. As the titular shrink, Spacey smokes so many joints, so ostentatiously, that he's barely ever seen without one. If the character had gone scuba diving, Pate would have found a way for him to toke up underwater.