Will “Field of Dreams” see you through a midlife crisis? Can “Groundhog Day” help you visualize your way out of a rut? What with America’s penchant for quick fixes, one can’t help but look askance at a recipe for personal evolution incorporating a pastime as popular as movie watching. But what goes by the name “video work” and “cinema therapy” is not without precedent. Aristotle, after all, theorized that tragic plays have the capacity to purify the spirit and aid us in coping with those aspects of life that cannot be reconciled by rational thought. Applying the concept in the 20th century, psychoanalytic critics have postulated that films, because of their dreamlike quality, transmit ideas through emotion rather than intellect, in some cases neutralizing the instinct to repress. One illustration of this: Some people will cry buckets over a sentimental movie but rarely in real life, even under duress.

Cline, now semi-retired, describes video watching as an “immersive experience involving sound, sight and a positive outcome.” He says “Films show how problem solving can be accomplished, and since many movies are fairly true to life, the situations often closely mirror a client’s. I think ‘Stepmom’ is the best film I’ve ever seen about how a parent can handle his or her death for a child. A therapist could also use ‘Stepmom’ to illustrate the anger that takes place between birth and stepparents and how this can undermine any children involved. If I had people fussing and feuding over a kid I’d demand they see ‘Stepmom’ and ask each of them which character is most like you.”

Another recent film about parent-child relationships Cline gives two thumbs up is “Life Is Beautiful”: “The father makes being in a concentration camp a game, and the child survives the situation quite well. It’s a psychiatric truth that kids handle situations about as well as the adults around them do.”

Cline isn’t aware of any studies tracking the effects of video watching in a therapeutic setting but says he doesn’t need research to know this works. “With some things you just have to say they’re obvious and you don’t need hard proof. You just know if you get a client to watch a particular movie and the person ‘gets’ what’s going on, you’ll be able to make some progress.”

As with any treatment that shows promise, some proponents of video healing make extravagant claims. Gary Solomon, a psychotherapist and the author of “The Motion Picture Prescription,” a video guide top-heavy with simplistic works like “Beaches” and “Rocky,” goes so far as to propose that “prison and jail administrators can show movies to the inmates that will change the way they think, feel and do things for the rest of their lives.” Cathie Glenn Sturdevant, author of “The Laugh & Cry Movie Guide,” would probably whip up the cons a batch of Jiffy Pop: “The touch, smell, and taste of popcorn on our fingers and in our mouths in conjunction with the sights and sounds of a film can open the doorway to a whole new realm of energizing possibilities,” she writes in her book.

That the “The Mummy” or “Phantom Menace” — with or without popcorn — might alter a person’s mental-health status seems beyond dubious, but before dismissing the healing potential of commercial cinema entirely, consider the case of Norman Cousins. The late author and editor wrote famously in his book “Anatomy of an Illness” about watching humorous films as part of his recovery from what had been diagnosed as terminal cancer. He found that “ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.” Sturdevant concludes in “Laugh & Cry” that Cousins “cured himself of a life-threatening illness by laughing at Marx Brothers movies,” but this simplifies the matter: They were one component of a regimen that included vitamin C, dietary changes and other responses. Cousins’ experience does hint, however, that beyond elevating mood, watching movies can, in tandem with psychotherapy or other treatments, be worthwhile.

The key component in video work is dialogue, says John Hesley, a psychotherapist who co-wrote “Rent Two Films and Lets Talk in the Morning” with his wife, Jan, a social worker. The Hesleys both express skepticism that viewing even the most emotion- or thought-provoking film will in itself bring about significant change. “Think about it,” says John. “Films have been out there a long time. If any unmediated healing was going to happen it would have already. Someone has to help draw out the emotions. If friends or family members talk about a film together, something positive could happen, connections being made to how a situation depicted in a film relates to something in real life. But you cant just jot down quick and easy ways to make a particular film ‘work’ and have that accomplish much.” Written for therapists, the Hesleys’ tome is the best of several with lists of films dealing with issues such as aging, death and parent-child relationships. Like the two guides mentioned above, it favors conventional works.

“The emphasis on popular films is partly because we only wanted to recommend films people could get at their local Blockbuster store,” responds John when teased for giving the trifling divorce movie “Bye Bye Love” a full write-up but supplying only a few sentences of commentary about the more complex Ingmar Bergman film “Scenes From a Marriage.” “But there are other reasons. HMOs today only allow patients from six to 10 visits — 80 percent of my clients are covered by HMOs — so you can’t spend too much time trying to set up a film or explain it. You need to deal in headlines. You get into a discussion of character, then move on to something relevant in the client’s life. Film is just a catalyst, to get to more substantive issues. And frankly, most of our clients wouldn’t sit through ‘Scenes From a Marriage.’”

“There is a danger you run with more powerful films,” he adds. “You don’t always know where they’re going to lead. ‘Scenes From a Marriage,’ if assigned inappropriately, could end up pushing a couple toward an unnecessary divorce. We can’t possibly know all the hot-button associations a particular client might make even with a film we’ve used before. So if we err with our suggestions, it’s on the side of caution, especially because with our book we’re making them for people we’ve never met.” Things can even go wrong with clients seen face to face, John acknowledges. “I had a woman whose son was going to prison. I had her watch ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ because I wanted her to see that although prison is a bleak situation there’s always hope and that the human spirit is resilient. The truth is it backfired. All she came away with was ‘Oh my God, my son’s going to be raped or beaten to death.’”

The points the Hesleys make about sticking to the mainstream are well taken, and they undoubtedly know what clicks with their clients. If there are two general criticisms that can be leveled about video guides to date, though, it’s the narrow range of selections and the willingness of authors to include works they admit are of little artistic merit merely because the films address a particular topic. The inclusion of the cloying “Dying Young” in one guide is all the more vexing because though it’s about death, nobody dies, reportedly because test audiences objected to that.

One can’t help but wonder if in some cases films that upended a patient’s expectations — thematically and even aesthetically — might be more efficacious. The therapeutic process itself requires patients to challenge their paradigms, something many of the films recommended, though by no means all, do gently if at all. There’s a danger in making things too tough on a client, but it’s likely possible to make things too simple. Indeed, some artists believe it’s only when confronted by new forms and formats that new ways of seeing or seeing oneself come about. This may be overstating the case, but much of popular cinema follows a trajectory so familiar that psychically it mightn’t be all that much of a call to action. A film like Fellini’s “8 1/2″ wouldn’t be for everyone, but might for some people suffering a crisis of confidence open more doors than titles like “Rocky” or “Field of Dreams.” No book I came across even mentions “8 1/2,” which comes to some of the same conclusions as the other two films but via a more introspective and provocative route.

As video work becomes more widespread — the Hesleys recently made a presentation to 150 or so clinicians, most of whom already use video in their practices — therapists might do well to team up with film scholars or cinéastes to fashion a broader palette. In the meantime, New York University’s medical school has made a good start with a brief yet varied film/video database that lists everything from Hollywood titles like “Awakenings” and “The Doctor” to art-house fare like “Antonia’s Line” and “Vanya on 42nd Street.” The university’s faculty uses the videos to acquaint future doctors with situations they or their patients might encounter, but many of the videos would be equally helpful for therapists or people seeking help on their own.

A few months ago I recommended “Marvin’s Room,” one of the database’s more mainstream works, to a close friend who’s his mother’s primary caregiver. Completely paralyzed for the past five years, she’s had senile dementia for more than a decade, and the enormity of attending to her day after day had finally gotten to him. A doctor he’d seen only twice diagnosed him as suffering from depression and prescribed Prozac, but my friend is wary of taking drugs, and reflecting on his circumstances we both wondered if he was depressed or simply exhausted. My friend isn’t the type to consider therapy but really was distressed, so I hoped that “Marvin’s Room,” in which Diane Keaton sacrifices two decades of the prime of her life to care for her ailing father, might provide a new perspective.

The database review describes Keaton’s character as “a model of loving care.” The film’s key achievement, though — in artistic terms in addition to any therapeutic benefits — is the way it portrays the Zenlike beauty of Keaton’s selfless behavior. Her sacrifice is indeed a great one, but it’s clear the experience enriches her as well. As with Foster Cline’s client who watched “The Miracle Worker,” the results were discernible if not spectacular and required some post-viewing discussion. My friend, who lives in a different city than I, mulled over the film’s message for a few weeks, occasionally holding the bottle of Prozac in his hand, he told me later, trying to decide whether he’d really changed his outlook or needed the pills. He ended up not taking the pills, and that he’d undergone a minor transformation was transparent when I saw him next, not only in his improved attitude but also in the serenity with which he attended to his mother. Though “Marvin’s Room” by no means cured him of depression, by his account it was indeed a catalyst: “I know nothing has changed about my situation and it still gets me down, but I do have a different relationship to it, and for that I give part of the credit to watching ‘Marvin’s Room.’”

The movies have been taking it on the chin these days for supposedly inciting violence and otherwise contaminating society’s values. Lawsuits against “Natural Born Killers” and “The Basketball Diaries” accuse their creators of providing road maps to killers. The issues are more complex than the suits suggest, but that a court is hearing the cases at all is a recognition that there is some interplay between film messages and the conscious and unconscious mind. If movies are capable of doing great harm, though, it stands to reason they possess the potential to heal as well.

At the film’s outset an African woman named Shandurai, played by Thandie Newton, flees her unnamed country after its military arrests her husband. She lands in Rome, where she enrolls in medical school, supporting herself by tidying up after an eccentric English musician who becomes intensely infatuated with her. Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis), as Shandurai always calls him, can’t just come out and tell her he’s mad about her. Via the dumbwaiter that connects their living quarters — a townhouse he inherited from his aunt — he shuttles cryptic gifts: a question mark on a blank sheet of music paper, an orchid, an heirloom ring.

When Shandurai returns the ring, saying she doesn’t understand him or his classical music — she prefers the African and international pop of performers like Salif Keita and Papa Wemba — Kinsky begs her to marry him, swearing to “do anything” if she’ll “just love me.” Mostly to shut him up, Newton screams, “You get my husband out of jail.” Stunned that she’s married, he momentarily backs off before embarking on an audacious scheme to prove his devotion.

Especially coming from a director who once declared source material a “springboard” for his own artistic agenda, from the standpoint of plot the film is a faithful adaptation of Lasdun’s “The Siege.” With but few modifications, Bertolucci, who wrote the screenplay, follows Lasdun’s outline and often employs the writer’s physical descriptions as stage direction. Bertolucci the bourgeois Marxist even takes Lasdun’s cue and downplays the colonial overtones inherent in a scenario about a woman of color whose financial survival is dependent on a white European who has expressed sexual interest in her.

The air of restraint carries through in the performance of Thewlis, who played the opposite type of character in “Naked.” The actor, pining here with even less success than he had as Verlaine chasing Rimbaud in “Total Eclipse,” quietly captures Kinsky’s neediness and dogged persistence. Newton, whose previous roles include the title character of “Beloved” and Thomas Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemings in “Jefferson in Paris,” relies perhaps too much on her expressive face. But she does manage to convey the fluctuations in her character’s emotions as Kinsky’s acts of kindness prompt her to see him in a new light.

Despite a strong core story and the generally inventive use of the townhouse interior to illustrate the dynamics of Shandurai and Kinsky’s relations, “Besieged” satisfies less than it might, mostly because Bertolucci filters the proceedings through a psychoanalytic prism. The Freudian spin in “The Conformist” and “The Last Emperor” helped illuminate character and even history (mid-20th century Europe and 20th-century China, respectively), but in “Besieged” it threatens to reduce two singular personalities to case studies. In one of Bertolucci’s several superfluous additions to Lasdun’s story, an Italian immigration official demands verification of Shandurai’s residency from the “head of family or your landlord.” Lest anyone miss the allusion, Shandurai later has a dream in which Kinsky’s face replaces that of her country’s repressive head of state — i.e., the stern patriarch.

Bertolucci has described the oeuvre of an auteur such as himself as being one big film, with each production essentially a chapter. In addition to their ostensible themes, his works contain a running commentary about the cinema and the state of his art. In the director’s cosmos, Kinsky is the flip side of Marlon Brando’s character in “Last Tango,” who sodomized Maria Schneider while ranting about the absurdity of romantic love and the family. Brando won most of his battles with Schneider, but lost the philosophical war, not to mention the girl: She dumped him and shot him in the groin — symbolic castration, for those who’ve forgotten their Freud.

A generation later, Bertolucci knows that Brando’s tough-guy approach affords even less of a chance of securing a lady’s heart or body, which perhaps explains his attraction to a tale about a man willing to concede just about anything for love. The emotions and influences at play here are complex — desire, need, loyalty, destiny, Romantic love and, to be sure, neurosis — but all the psychologizing obscures and oversimplifies them.

“Besieged” tips its already shaky hand when Thewlis hocks his piano — his means of creating art — to finance his campaign to make Newton care for him. As the instrument dangles on the end of a phallic crane, the man buying the piano tells Shandurai, “Get out of the way, you’ve got no business here.” Bertolucci undoubtedly recognizes the statement’s irony, but it’s still telling that the comment is to a woman, one studying to be a doctor no less. Ultimately, though, the issue here is more lack of imagination than misogyny: the playing of the Freudian card — for about the 10th time in the film — to heighten a scene’s drama. Well before “Besieged” was over I’d begun to wish Bertolucci had latched onto Jung instead of Freud — at least he’d have had the infinite permutations of the collective unconscious to plumb instead of recycling Oedipal archetypes.

Like Brando, Kinsky ends up symbolically castrated, though in his case a quiet bliss overtakes him. Hmm. Maybe getting laid is worth giving up one’s art. Kinsky’s artistic demise, along with an earlier scene in which he abandons playing the piano for some kids and begins juggling fruit for them, lends the film’s Bertoluccian back-story a weary air of self-pity.

Given Bertolucci’s impish leanings, the self-referential sequences may merely be gags. If so, they’re among a half-dozen others that backfire, among them the witless cut to a speeding subway train following a gratuitous medical-school discussion about contracted colons. Ho, ho. The gloppy Freudian overlay, the bad puns and lazy segues — like the cut from the orchid to a similarly colored umbrella — cumulatively undermine Lasdun’s elegant tango. Bertolucci may have found the story too slight, but his transformation of it only reaffirms the axiom that less is more.

Eric, the film’s protagonist and Stephens’ alter ego, falls into the sensitive-lad category. A precocious jumble of delusions played by Chris Stafford, Eric has just come around to the notion that he’s attracted to men. As “Edge” begins, it’s 1984, the summer after his junior year in high school. He’s gotten a job as a “grubber” (food handler) at an Ohio amusement-park cafeteria run by the amiably butch Angie (Lea DeLaria). Mom celebrates a Kodak moment on her son’s first day on the job, and Toni Basil’s “Mickey” blares on the car stereo as he drives to the park with his best friend and fellow grubber, Maggie (Tina Holmes, whose face alternately recalls Meryl Streep and Ricki Lake).

Ripe for the picking and yearning to be plucked, Eric allows himself to be seduced by Rod (Andrew Gabrych), a college-age co-worker. Eric’s first sexual encounter is among the film’s most carefully thought-out sequences; Stafford is by turns awash with giddy expectation, inchoate lust, utter cluelessness and ripples of ecstasy. I’m making their tryst sound hotter than it is, but the range of emotions they communicate is a tribute to the actors, especially Stafford. The use of a mostly static camera and shots of fairly long duration lend the scene a real-life, real-time quality. This keeps things from getting mushy, though for all the attempts at verisimilitude the sequence still comes off a tad calculated. One feels almost as though Stephens has supplied his director, David Moreton, with a checklist of behaviors and sentiments to portray rather than a completely integrated scene.

This studied quality becomes even more pronounced during a later moment when Eric’s mother (Stephanie McVay), who’d sacrificed her interest in music to raise a family, sits wistfully at her piano. She’s disillusioned with her son, who’s been staying out late, dressing weird, and overdosing on peroxide and hair dye; when she begins tickling the ivories, plot seems to motivate the deed more than character. You can see why Stephens wrote the scene, but McVay doesn’t really pull it off, and it’s not her fault.

For the most part, though, the awkward patches, which often mirror the younger characters’ naiveti, paradoxically add to the film’s charms. An unequivocal delight is the soundtrack, a canny compendium of ’80s hits whose lyrics highlight the action. Missing Persons, the Eurythmics, Bronski Beat, Animotion, Flock of Seagulls and the Thompson Twins all chime in — just about every group you might imagine except for Culture Club, though there is a Boy George reference. The attention to musical detail pays off in a marvelous, unself-conscious sense of time and place. (I have to credit any film that makes me nostalgic, however mildly, for the Reagan era.)

By the 1980s, after a decade or so of gay parades and protests and countless Phil Donahue talk-show segments about homosexuality, even kids in the Midwest could come out to their parents without the roof caving in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily make coming out to one’s peers or oneself — or, for that matter, learning about sex itself — any easier. From time immemorial, for youths of all orientations, the first few stabs at sex often turn out to be troubling predicaments rather than the romantic events they’ve imagined, something “Edge” conveys quite well.

In the end, “Edge” tells a timeless story. Long before the ’80s, gay guys tortured their best girlfriends the way Eric does Maggie. Partly to prove he’s not a fag and partly because he has conflated sexual attraction and deep friendship, he goes to bed with her, with predictably disastrous results. Nor was that decade the first time a kid found both terror and salvation in the gay community, where for every cad like the one who diddles Eric in a parked car and then can’t wait to get rid of him, there’s a compassionate lesbian like Angie to provide solace and guidance.

The ebullient DeLaria had just completed her career-making turn as Hildy in the Shakespeare in the Park production of “On the Town” when shooting on “Edge” began. The comedienne, who jacks up just about every scene she’s in, gives the film its star power. In a few cases, she could have used an extra take — doubtless a luxury on the budget of this production — but like its writer and director, she more than gets by on spunk and energy.