Very, Very Unofficial

Universal’s “The Dream Team,” an Imagine Entertainment comedy about four mental patients left on their own overnight in NYC, has gotten some favorable reviews. But while praising its laugh quotient, Daily Variety’s Todd McCarthy also criticized it as “a hokey comedy that basically reduces mental illness to a grab bag of quirky shtick . . . the way in which the mentally handicapped characters are used (for yuks) is occasionally off-putting and unsettling.”

Co-writer/co-producer Jon Connolly assured us that he and partner David Loucka pored over case histories and “talked to seven, maybe eight, psychiatrists” for accuracy’s sake and to make the film “as real as possible in a comedy context.” He named Greenwich, Conn., psychiatrist John Tamerin and noted NYC psychologist Albert Ellis as “unofficial consultants.”

So we called them.

“Jon is a good friend, and I don’t want to hurt his movie,” said Tamerin, “but clearly, to suggest that this movie is based on psychiatric information--particularly from me--would be utterly preposterous. He mentioned that he was writing this thing, and that was about it. I totally eschew any responsibility.”

An assistant of Ellis told us the psychologist didn’t “have much of a recollection” of speaking to anyone from “Dream Team”--”a lot of people from Hollywood call and talk for a minute or two.”

Tamerin called the movie “a farce, a burlesque, a caricature of some extreme kinds of mental illness. The fact that it deals with psychiatry instead of fraternity houses is almost irrelevant. . . . It’s like it’s from Mars in terms of psychiatric reality.”