Five years ago, Jonah Hill’s brother died suddenly. His therapist took a photograph of his grief.

On December 22, 2017, actor and filmmaker Jonah Hill learned that his brother Jordan Feldstein had died suddenly. 

At the time, and in the years since, he has said very little publicly. 

We know now that the first thing he did was arrive on the doorstep of his therapist's office. 

His therapist, Phil Stutz, is the subject of Hill's critically acclaimed new documentary streaming on Netflix titled Stutz. 

"I spend a lot of my life avoiding thinking about that day," Hill reflects in Stutz. "I went into your office. It was definitely the most intense day in my life."

Feldstein had died of a sudden blood clot, blocking an artery in his lungs. At 40 years old, he was a music manager for a number of artists including Maroon 5 and Robin Thicke. He was the eldest brother of both Jonah Hill (whose full name is Jonah Hill Feldstein) and Beanie Feldstein, best known for her roles in Lady Bird and Booksmart. He was also a father to two young sons. 

When Hill appeared at his therapist's office, Stutz did something unconventional. He asked Hill for permission to take a photograph. Four years on, Hill says in the documentary, he has still not looked at it. 

He asks Stutz why he chose to take that photograph. 

Stutz responds how rare it is in life to "get a chance to record something at the climactic most important moment, and then you come back to it, whether it's in a week or a year... there's a time gap. And in that time gap you actually experience the forces of healing and recovery."

Jonah Hill on the day his brother died. 

When confronting the picture for the first time, Hill says, "I look stripped of everything fake. And there is an oddly serene look on my face which is so bizarre, but maybe because it demolished everything that didn't matter."

"That's the picture of somebody who's gone through hell and came out the other side," Stutz adds. "And is really okay. That's a picture of victory even though it might not look like it."

In January 2020 in the wake of Kobe Bryant's death, Hill shared an image of the two on Instagram, which had been taken by his late brother. He wrote: "I’m sitting next to my brother, and he’s taking this... It was the night we both met Kobe, and he was so nice to us. So funny, so amazing and so kind... My brother and I grew up worshiping the Lakers and because of my job we got to sit next to Kobe and the whole team! I have lived a privileged life. Truly. We were literally buzzing with excitement to meet our hero and it’s one of my favorite memories ever. It’s my favorite memory with my brother. I’m sitting between Kobe and my brother and now they’re both gone."

He added, "I have been staring at this photo for days in disbelief and sadness and joy. It’s my favorite picture and I think it represents for me, all of the hard and amazing things in life and how fleeting they are. But their fleeting nature doesn’t make them any less beautiful."

Jonah Hill with Kobe Bryant. Image via Instagram. 

Stutz himself lost a brother when he was nine years old, and his brother was three. The documentary explores how that experience impacted him as a child and the relationship he had with his parents. 

Stutz breaks into what is conventionally the most private of relationships - that between a patient and their therapist. While it could have steered into navel-gazing, therapy-speak nonsense, the film is layered with self-awareness and a meta assessment of what exactly this project is about. The project of making the film becomes almost a metaphor for life. It's about falling in love with the process, taking risks, living authentically and vulnerably while growing comfortable with uncertainty and doubt, and then extricating oneself from the outcome. Is the documentary a success or a failure? For the viewer it might be a success. But for Stutz and Hill, that's not really the point. 

The film offers a variety of tools developed by Stutz, to help patients with anxiety, depression, grief and chronic self doubt. It's an exercise in democratising access to therapy. Hill's motivation was to share with the rest of the world the advice and strategies that made his own life infinitely better, but without the Hollywood price tag. 

Hill also speaks candidly about his relationship with body image and weight. He says, "I had no health self-esteem. Having grown up overweight was something that sounds like not a big deal... but for me personally, it intensely f*cked me up." 

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A post shared by Beanie Feldstein (@beaniefeldstein)

Here, Stutz introduces a concept called the Shadow, which he describes as the "part of you that you wish you were not". Simply, the Shadow is the one we perceive as the "weakest, most flawed, inferior or even disgusting parts of yourself". 

Hill grapples with a cutout of himself from adolescence, where he was lacking self-esteem and struggling with body image. He says that part of his motivation in Hollywood was to move as far away from this figure as possible, and he had imagined that fame, success and external validation would deliver him the self-esteem he so desperately needed. 

In the end though, he still felt like the same 14-year-old with acne, wracked with self-loathing. 

The best thing to do with one's Shadow, Stutz explains, is to bond with it. Rather than denying they exist, one should learn to love and accept the version of themselves they most struggle with. 

Stutz is a testament to the intimacy and power of therapy. It leaves the viewer with a variety of tools and practical advice from one of the world's leading psychiatrists. 

You can watch Stutz on Netflix. 

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