Cinema: The Shrinking Shrink

Normally, Joe is a psychiatrist. But Joe is no longer normal. In order to heal himself, he holes up in a strange pad, assumes a fresh identity and films his sexual and spiritual agonies in a voyeur's version of Candid Camera. The analyst analyzed, the schizoid psyche caught flagrante delicto—it is a notion worthy of Pirandello or Antonioni. And totally beyond Milton Moses Ginsberg, neophyte writer-director of Coming Apart.

At the start, Ginsberg shows a flicker of humor—which is more than can be said for his actors. When Joe (Rip Torn) tells a masochistic nymph that "there are only two or three...