A logline should be a statement about a protagonist’s objective goal.? Why?? Because film is a visual medium and that means the protagonist’s goal needs to be defined in terms that can be visualized on screen.? Which means that an objective goal needs to be defined in terms of a physical object, event, person, place or process.

What’s the visual, the screen shot for “deeper truths about himself”?

Also the protagonist’s goal must be intentional.? That is, it must be something he consciously, purposefully, deliberately decides to do.? It cannot be an unintended consequence of trying to do something else.?Which surely is the case in this logline.

For the shrink doesn’t intentionally take on the drunk thinking “I gotta work with this drunk in order to face deeper truths about myself”.? No, he takes on the drunk with the conscious, intended purpose of curing him.? And in the process of trying to cure the drunk, he unintentionally discovers he needs to cure himself.? As it is written: “Physician heal thyself.”

Which is fine for fleshing out a plot.? ?The problem in terms of a logline is that the discovery relates to the shrink’s subjective needs, not his objective wants. And loglines are about objective wants, not subjective needs.

At the psychological level, this story seems similar to the movie “Equus” (1977)? adapted from Peter Schaeffer’s highly acclaimed, acutely insightful play.? The? setup for the plot is that a burned out shrink who dabbles in Greek history and mythology reluctantly agrees to treat a troubled teenage boy? who blinded six horses.? The shrink’s intentional objective goal is to discover why the boy committed the heinous acts, and cure him of the psychopathology that motivated him.

And sure enough, treating the boy has unforeseen, unintended consequences.? As he discovers deeper truths about the boy, the shrink unintentionally discovers deeper truths about himself.

He comes to realize that the troubled teen’s? psyche is imbued with what his own psyche is devoid of, in so desperate need of:? passion.? That when he stares into the teen’s eyes, Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, of drunken excess. of ecstasy is staring back him, accusing him, damning him for living a passion-less and loveless life.

And I presume that a similar epiphany is to be the unintended consequence of the shrink working with drunk. The drunk is an incarnation of what the shrink desperately lacks, urgently needs. Which is fine.? But, to repeat, plot epiphanies are by definition unintended consequences, not an intentional goals.? So while central to the working out of the plot, “facing deeper truths about himself” is extraneous to the logline.

A logline should be a concise statement of a protagonist’s intentional objective goal.

fwiw

My takeaway is that if you are going to have a protagonist with face blindness, leverage it to the max; the plot should pivot on that disability. But? I’m not sure how it does in your latest iteration.

>>>and confront his traumatic past

So having face-blindness isn’t of itself a big enough personal problem to wrestle with?? And? conversely, if he “confronts his traumatic past” — whatever that entails — it won’t cure his face-blindness.? He will still have to cope with the disability every day of his life.? IOW: I think the face-blindness is his central personal problem,? past trauma is a sidebar issue.

Whatever, for the purpose of a logline, the “traumatic past” is a subjective issue, hence extraneous, not necessary to mention in the logline.? Loglines are about protagonists striving toward an objective goals in the future, not dealing with subjective issues in the past.

fwiw