At the beginning of Stutz, Jonah Hill asks his therapist, Phil Stutz, the subject of the documentary that premiered on Netflix last year, why he thinks he’s making a film about him.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just an attempt to gain control over me,” Stutz quips back.
It’s just a tossed-off joke, but it’s one that stands out more now than it probably did when the movie came out in 2022. This is because a few days ago, an ex-girlfriend of Hill’s shared screenshots on social media of what she claimed were text message conversations between them in which he displayed emotionally abusive—specifically, very controlling—behavior during their relationship. The woman, Sarah Brady, is a surfer who dated Hill for around a year starting in 2021, and the screenshots (which Hill has not commented on or verified) kicked off a firestorm over both Hill’s conduct and Brady’s decision to air their messages publicly.
In the screenshots, a person saved as “Jonah” appears to criticize Brady for things like wearing swimsuits in photos on her Instagram account (never mind that she is a professional surfer), wanting to work as a model, and maintaining friendships and spending time with people he doesn’t approve of. This is unfortunately pretty textbook manipulative-partner stuff, but something that really stands out about the messages is the way these things are said: As many people have pointed out, the person doing the chastising has co-opted the language of therapy and mental health. He tells Brady that if she wants to have friendships with “unstable” women from her “wild recent past,” he’s not the “right partner” for her—this, apparently, is one of his “boundaries.” (Is that how boundaries work?) He then tells her that he doesn’t want them to do “surf social things” until he can trust her. “I am being as vulnerable as possible and I am telling you I am needing you to step up to the plate,” he wrote. It’s unclear what his banning her from socializing has to do with vulnerability, but OK!
There’s been some debate about just how bad the texts are and how seriously we should take them, but everyone except Candace Owens seems to agree that they’re the work of a deeply shitty boyfriend, someone whose mental wellness does not seem worth emulating. So it’s ironic that, before all this, Hill was trying to make his openness around mental health a big part of his brand. Most actors don’t speak a ton about mental health; almost none have literally made documentaries about their therapists. Hill did, deliberately positioning himself as an advocate for “doing the work.” Watching Stutz after reading those messages is a strange and jarring experience, not because it now plays as a villain origin story—“boundaries” are not something the movie spends much time on—but because it shows you how it all could have and should have gone differently.
Toward the beginning of the movie, Hill says that one of his goals is to bring Dr. Stutz’s tools, which have helped him immensely, to a wider audience. Stutz is the co-author of a book called The Tools and is known for a set of concepts that he instills in patients via shaky notecard illustrations. For example, a big one is working on your “life force” pyramid—the idea that you can make immediate progress toward improving your mood if you work on three things: your physical body, your relationships with other people, and your relationship with yourself. (Stutz is Hill’s personal therapist; Brady’s texts also mention a separate couples therapist that the couple seems to have been seeing.)
While the movie is about Stutz, and narrates his life story and therapeutic philosophies, it’s also about Hill. It’s become trendy for famous people to take up mental health advocacy in recent years, but many of their efforts can feel shallow—remember when the cast of Ted Lasso went to the White House? Before these recent events, I might have said that Hill’s represented one of the better, more resonant attempts to wade into these waters. He seems to be genuinely grappling with his issues and imperfections. At one point, for example, Stutz introduces a tool called “the Shadow.” When he met Stutz in his 30s, Hill was outwardly successful, but Stutz contended that one source of his mental health struggles was that he was denying his shadow, or his teenage self that still felt slighted and rejected. While discussing this, Hill produces a large cardboard cutout of himself at 14, pimply and ashamed of his weight. Stutz says Hill has to talk to his shadow, include him in his life, and even be proud of him. It may sound corny, but it’s also concrete in a way that feels useful and, yes, vulnerable too. I could be a sucker, but the documentary really seems like the work of someone who has grown through therapy. So it’s that much sadder to watch with the knowledge that maybe that growth has stalled or backtracked, or was never internalized at all.
There are tools and concepts that come up in the movie that seem pretty relevant to the text message mess, tools you wish the person allegedly berating his partner would have taken advantage of. Stutz talks about “the maze,” or getting trapped in the past because you’re obsessed with fairness and slights against you. The way to combat it is through “active love”—imagining all the love in the universe, and sending it toward the person you’re angry with. It’s not hard to imagine that it might have been more productive if, hypothetically, a guy who was mad at his girlfriend for posting bikini pics on Instagram realized he was obsessing over the past and tried sending some love her way instead of monstrous text messages.
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In other parts of the film, though, you can see hints of useful ideas that have the potential to calcify into something less helpful. At one point, Hill owns up to lying to Stutz in some of their sessions, saying he realized the only way to deal with the problem was to be vulnerable. A small part of me wondered: Is this when he started thinking of vulnerability as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card? Later, when talking about how you can learn through failure, Hill makes a joke about how the worse the movie turns out, the better it’ll be. Again, a small part of me thought: OK, but you do know that that doesn’t mean everything you do is automatically good and right, right?
The film hammers home the point that there will never be anyone who completely has it all figured out. Though, again, we don’t really know what happened between Brady and Hill, the text messages read as if one party lost sight of that. Perhaps he became so confident he was good at therapy that he thought he’d reached his final form and could stop evolving. Does making a documentary about therapy infect you with a kind of hubris that makes you think you’ve conquered therapy? You can say you’re practicing radical acceptance and owning your issues as a way of absolving yourself of all possible wrongdoing, but Stutz teaches us that mental health is really hard, there are no exemptions, and it never stops being really hard. One wishes the director of the film, of all people, would take that lesson to heart.