Ira and Abby
Directed by Robert Cary
If I could marry Ira and Abby, I would. I can’t because (a) I’m married already and (b) Ira and Abby is made up not of bone and sinew but of seven reels of celluloid. But–and I hope my wife will forgive me for this–I did fall deeply in love with this movie, and I did so instantly. And that’s interesting, since Ira and Abby is about two people who fall for each other instantly. But unlike other romantic comedies, marriage is not the logical conclusion of the story of the title characters. Instead, it’s a starting point, since Ira and Abby get married a week after they meet and must deal with the consequences of their intemperate action.
As it must in any romantic comedy, crisis erupts between the lovers, who are (needless to say) meant to be together. But theirs isn’t the only marital crisis in Ira and Abby. Their union also disrupts two other unions, one blissfully happy and the other entropically miserable. And these three crises ripple outward and threaten to bring down the entire psychotherapeutic community of New York City.
I should warn you that if you see Ira and Abby–and oh, how you should–you might not share my particular passion for it. The thing is, Ira and Abby and I have a great deal in common. The movie is set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live. Its protagonists are New York kids who grew up on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood I grew up in. Abby works at the Paris Health Club, which was built around an indoor pool eight blocks from my home, where I would beg my mother to take me swimming.
The similarities do not end there. Ira lives in a building where I once almost bought an apartment. Ira goes to a Greek diner I attend frequently and changes his order seven times, which is exactly what I do there. Ira and Abby are both Jewish (though, as was the case with Elaine and George on Seinfeld, the filmmakers pretend Abby is a Gentile for some reason)–just like this writer and his wife, who is so Jewish that she is the daughter of a rabbi. And I was once married to someone after getting engaged after a week or so; please note the past tense.
So, yes, Ira and Abby has special resonance for me. But it’s still, by any objective standard, an absolutely wonderful little movie and a smashing tour de force for its lead actress and writer, who happen to be the same person. Jennifer Westfeldt is her name. A few years ago she made a small sensation as the star and cowriter of another little movie called Kissing Jessica Stein, in which she played a perpetually dissatisfied journalist who figures that the reason she can’t find a man to love is that she’s actually a lesbian.
Only when she joins the pink team, Jessica Stein and her new girlfriend find to their mutual distress that she is exactly the same difficult person she was before, with the same exacting standards and high-maintenance demands. Jessica Stein is a superbly crafted character, a total pain who is nonetheless winning and touching because, like all memorable comic protagonists, she means no harm and is her own worst enemy.
It’s therefore especially impressive that Abby, the character Westfeldt conceived and plays here, is an entirely different and yet entirely recognizable type. She’s the person who immediately becomes everybody’s best friend–the warm stranger on the plane to whom you find yourself telling all your troubles. She involves herself in the lives of anyone who will allow her to do so, offering sterling advice and loving counsel despite the fact that she is herself so incompetent she can barely tie her own shoes. Well past 30 and still living with her parents, she works as a membership salesman at a health club but tries to convince people not to waste their money by joining. Her indiscriminate kindness is what draws the frozen Ira to her.
As Ira, an actor heretofore unfamiliar to me named Chris Messina blows you away. He’s funny and fragile like a young and unmannered Woody Allen, but far better looking and actually capable of expressing and conveying genuine emotion. Abby bears no relation to Jessica Stein, but Ira does: He’s a therapized son of therapists who is in desultory training to be a therapist himself. He has written one paragraph of a doctoral dissertation, and otherwise seems to do nothing with his life. He has broken up with, and gotten back together with, his girlfriend four times in the previous year.
Of the two, Ira is the character in need of salvation, even though he is convinced Abby is a bigger mess than he is. At the same time, Ira has cause for his growing jealousy of just about everybody else on earth, since everybody else on earth gets the same attention from his wife that he does.
Still, the movie is entirely on Abby’s side; her intuitive sense of people and her compulsion to feel rather than analyze marks her as one of nature’s noblewomen. Ira and Abby is a comic broadside against the talking cure and its practitioners, who seem to be the only other people in Manhattan besides the two of them. Ira’s infuriating passivity finally gets the better of his impatient psychoanalyst, who dismisses Ira from his care in the movie’s hilarious opening scene. The same analyst makes another appearance, along with six or seven of his professional ilk, in the movie’s even more hilarious and fanciful climactic sequence. “I can’t believe you won therapy!” a deeply distressed Ira says after Abby charms their marriage counselor during her first-ever visit to an analyst’s office. For that line alone, Ira and Abby deserves to live forever.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
