Mr. Jealousy

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Munkhchimeg T One of the good comedy movies in 90s. The colours and style are quite different from modern cities which is really warm to watch Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 07/23/24 Full Review Audience Member An almost un-watchable tour de force of early Baumbach. The film would have been thoroughly improved if Stoltz and Bogdanovich had had a love scene because this would have more accurately portrayed the writer/director's relationship with the elder director. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/16/23 Full Review Audience Member it was fantastic! what else can i say? Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/23/23 Full Review Audience Member Painfully boring and even more painful to watch- if you can stay awake long enough. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member This isn't Noah Baumbach's best work but much like Kicking and Screaming (1995) it's another solid effort that whilst not fully formed is still entertaining and charming enough to be worth viewing. It is here that the influences of other directors on Baumbach are most clear as the dialogue feels very Woody Allen, the characters very Whit Stilman and the directing style oddly similar to Brian De Palma. I appreciate the fact that Eric Stoltz gets to play the lead here as he is a wonderful on screen presence and he was one of the best parts of Kicking and Screaming. This isn't classic Baumbach, it's hardly The Squid and the Whale (2005) or The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), but much like David O. Russell's Flirting with Disaster (1996) it's a pleasant if unfocused little film. Part time teacher and aspiring writer Lester Grimm, Eric Stoltz, has been possessive of his girlfriends since childhood due to a traumatic incident when he was just fifteen. His most recent girlfriend Ramona, Anabella Sciorra, was in a relationship with successful writer Dashiell Frank, Chris Eigeman, which puts fear into him. He thinks he can deal with his jealousy by attending the same therapy group as Dashiell while impersonating his troubled friend Vince, Carlos Jacott. Predictably the therapy sessions just give him more anxiety and place further strain on his relationship Ramona. Inevitably the two end up together however. The best scenes in the film come when Lester and Dashiell unexpectedly become friends and have an awkward conversation at a bar during which Dashiell confesses that he admires Lester's brutal attacks on him. Eigeman and Stoltz have a wonderful sort of chemistry as Stoltz is believable is his nerviness and you get the sense that he is uncomfortable in his own skin while Eigeman is great as a pretentious, self absorbed writer who doesn't acknowledge how insecure he is. Just watching the two of them sitting around alternately trading barbs or giving unexpected complements to one another was delightful and Baumbach is able to mine some real humor from these scenes as when we meet Dashiell's much talked about girlfriend Irene, Bridget Fonda!, she complains about the alcohol he forces on her while he stews in the corner. These are also the scenes where Baumbach gets away from the clear echoes of other directors and speaks with his own voice most clearly. This is not to say that the Allen-esque elements of the film don't work as the voiceover and flashbacks can be very charming and the comedy of errors is set up well. Watching the friend group hang out while discussing their neuroses in depth is entertaining but we don't spend too much time with them which prevents it from slipping into You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) territory. I do appreciate originality in the films that I watch but if someone is able to produce a derivative but well made version of another director's style of comedy I still think they deserve praise. The writing of the female characters in this film is refreshing as we see Ramona as a refreshingly competent, self actualized woman who has fallen prey to a needy man. Her friendship with Lucretia, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, also feels real and we enjoy spending time with the two of them as much as we do the men. Baumbach has always had a talent for writing charming, witty female characters, aided later on in his career by the presence of Greta Gerwig, that prevents his films from feeling sexist as some ‘neurotic man romantic comedies' do. This is a film that clearly holds the perspective that Lester is a loser and Ramona is clearly too good for him which is nice to see in an era where Mr. Wrong (1996) was getting released. I would watch this film because I am willing to watch anything produced by Baumbach, other than Highball (1997), but if you don't like his work or only want to see his fully realized directorial efforts this won't be for you. Then again you could do much worse in trying to find late 1990s independent comedies to watch and this film's efforts to update some of Allen's tropes are successful. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member i liked the idea of the movie but sometimes i felt it was trying to be smarter than it actually was..overall it was ok. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/09/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Mr. Jealousy

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