"a little meshugenah, maybe"

But "The Patient" Pays off in the End"

 (If you’re spoiler-wary, be forewarned)

Actually, more than a little meshugenah (Yiddish for crazy), given a premise that finds Alan Strauss, a Jewish therapist (pardon the redundancy), played by the non-Jewish Steve Carell (more on interfaith casting to come), held captive in the home of his young, serial-killer client, Sam Fortner (Domhnall Gleason), whose motivation is essentially: “Cure me or else.”

The ten-episode FX/Hulu mini-series is played for maximum claustrophobic terror and only minimally “opened up”—through Alan’s brief flashbacks to his family; imagined conversations with his deceased mentor, Charlie (David Alan Grier); nightmare snippets of Auschwitz; one “real time” scene of Alan’s son, Ezra (Andrew Leeds), posting “Missing” flyers around town; and occasional glimpses of Sam’s life outside the makeshift prison, including his latest murder.

The story proceeds along parallel tracks. The first is Alan’s cat and mouse game for survival with Sam, and with his mother, Candice (Linda Emond). Perhaps most bizarrely, Candice lives in the house with Sam and knows what he’s done—and likely will do again!—but refuses to turn him in because “he’s my baby.”

The second track, and the crux of the series, is Alan’s coming to grips with his relationship to Ezra, a ba’al teshuvah (master of the return) who in adulthood rejected his parents’ Reform Judaism, became an Orthodox Jew, and is raising his children in accordance with the prescriptions and proscriptions of halakah (traditional Jewish law). Ezra’s “conversion,” combined with self-righteous rancor toward his parents, had been especially hurtful to Alan’s recently deceased wife, Beth (Laura Niemi), who was a cantor in the community’s Reform synagogue.

Alan grapples with this conflict throughout his life-and-death ordeal, and is ultimately shown to be moving toward resolution—partly through a letter he writes Ezra from captivity, which he hopes his son might someday receive, but mostly through the phrase he mutters to himself after completing the letter: “a little meshugenah, maybe.”

Films sometimes end with spoken or written words that serve as “aha” moments: to sum things up, unlock a mystery, or add a clever twist. Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” and Some Like It Hot’s “Well, nobody’s perfect” come prominently to mind. Indeed, as in Kane—whose overall quality I’m by no means equating with this above-average streamer—the revelatory word, or words in The Patient’s case, also appear twice, with their meaning only clarified the second time around.

Before I elaborate how The Patient’s climactic phrase functions and what it signifies, I promised I’d at least touch on the show’s interfaith casting, and with good reason. Lead actors portraying characters whose race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation doesn’t match their own has become a hot-button issue in recent decades. And sure enough, though one would think the “transgressions” in Transparent (2014-19) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-) might have laid the Jewish side of the controversy to rest, The Patient’s creators, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, were confronted on a press tour about the non-Jewish casting of Steve Carell.

“As television writers,” Fields responded, “we’re kind of in an area where people are pretending to be other people. That’s what everyone does all the time. And that’s just our main outlook on it. But we understand some people feel differently about it and that is also fine.”[i]

Put another way, should only cops play cops, robbers play robbers, with the same limitation applying to butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers? Actors are expected to, indeed thrive upon, “becoming” someone other than themselves, and are rewarded come Oscar, Emmy, and Tony time for their ability to do so.

But okay, the issue here concerns aggrieved minorities, those who over time have suffered the most media mismatching and societal mistreatment. The problem with lumping Jews into this category is that while they’ve certainly been maligned through much of American history, and continue to face antisemitism, their abuse—in society and in the media—has been substantially less than that encountered by people of color or LGBTQs. Jews, also, partly due to their perceived Whiteness, have been absorbed into the mainstream to a far greater extent than other minorities.[ii] Thus, for some of my fellow Jews to demand that only “our people” be allowed to play Jews, especially with no lack of non-Jewish characters available to Jewish actors, seems a strained attempt to rejoin the multiculture and regain the moral righteousness of marginalization.

This doesn’t mean there should be no criteria at all for Jewish representation. One would still hope that the creators of Jewish-themed shows or films identify as Jewish—as was the case with Transparent’s Jill/Joey Soloway and remains so for Mrs. Maisel’s Amy Sherman-Palladino. Most importantly, the Jewish portrayals should be dimensional and respectful and eschew demeaning stereotypes, or at least counterbalance the latter with sympathetic depictions.

These requirements are satisfied in spades in The Patient. The show’s creators, Fields (whose father is a rabbi) and Weisberg, are Jewish. And Alan Strauss is represented in a respectful, non-stereotypical manner, both as a Jew and as a therapist (another traditionally maligned figure), as are his Orthodox son Ezra, cantor wife Beth, and daughter Soshana (Renata Friedman), all of whom are played by Jews.

 Now that this thorny issue has been addressed, back to “a little meshugenah, maybe,” and the payoff it provides for The Patient.

 When Alan first utters this Yiddish-spiced phrase, with a slight shake of the head and a faint smile, after jotting something in a note pad, we have no definite idea how to read the statement or the body language. We don’t know at the time that what he’s written is a letter to Ezra and Soshana. The most reasonable assumption is that it relates to his therapy sessions with Sam, who had allowed Alan to use the pad for that purpose. Given that Alan’s odds of survival at this point are slim and none, however, his amused reaction is counterintuitive, at best a sign that he’s resigned to his dismal fate.

The second utterance, head shake, and smile—exact duplicates of the first, rendered in flashback—cast them in a decidedly different, more rewarding light. Without giving away the farm, Alan’s response now clearly relates, but in oblique fashion, to the letter he’s written to his son and daughter. Presented through Alan’s voice-over, the letter echoes the kindly feelings he’d evinced toward Shoshana during his captivity, but represents a seismic shift in his attitude toward Ezra—“the extreme Jew” who’d caused him and Beth so much tsuris (suffering). He now expresses deep regret over his own judgmental stance toward Ezra’s Orthodoxy, and concludes with an apology for not respecting his son’s life choice.

And yet, the “a little meshugenah, maybe,” slight head shake, and faint smile complicate the written words of atonement. They indicate Alan’s residual, if softened, discomfort with Ezra’s Orthodox path. While Ezra himself, as shown in the film’s epilogue scene, sitting on a couch across from a male therapist, intimates that his father’s experience has forced him to reexamine his oedipal relationship as well.

A tentative rapprochement between father and son, in other words, one that resonates with the real-world coming-together we all desperately need in our more than a little meshugenah times.

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[i] The Fields quote is in Kevin Swanstrom, “The Patient Creators Defend Casting Steve Carell As A Jewish Character,” Screenrant, August 2, 2022, https://screenrant.com/patient-steve-carell-casting-jewish-creators-response.

[ii] It took until the 1940s for Ashkenazi Jews (European Jews other than those from Spain and Portugal) to be recognized as White in the US census. See Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks . . . and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).