Mr. Jealousy

A film about relations; you may think: Oh no not an another one, not a Woody Allen remake. Wrong, this is a screwball comedy like the films with Cary Grant en Katherine Hepburn. Makes group therapy slightly ridiculous. Stoltz is great as the jealous lover, obsessed with the past of his present girlfriend.

Aside from a thoroughly misrepresentative title, "Mr. Jealousy" is actually quite entertaining. With good acting, a good story, and the brand of direction one only gets from the writer, the film is a genuinely charming romantic comedy. The humor is subtle and the dialogue poetic, but if you like that kind of thing (think "Royal Tenenbaums" meets "Kissing Jessica Stein," with most emphasis on the Stein) you should rent it. It's esoteric, but if you get it you'll like it.

Stoltz is handsome, but his thrust is weak. He is in a maze searching for past lovers with whom his girlfriend has hooked up. He stalks. Even joins a therapy group with his girlfriend's ex boyfriend using another identity. Characters become laughable, because they are led not by legitimate feelings but complex plot moves. Romance must have a natural flow: Mr. Jealousy borders on slapstick. American romance doesn't take itself seriously. Why must there always be romantic comedy?

"Mr. Jealousy" is a somewhat tedious heavily narrated Woody Allen-esque intellectual musing of relationship issues, specifically jealousy, with a NYC Gen-X milieu. A romantic-comedy tale of a tentative Stoltz's affair with a too experienced Sciorra, this emotionally sterile and somewhat heady flick is not likely to evoke more than an occasional chuckle nor milk a single tear nor give anyone the warm and fuzzies. Okay stuff for those into microscopic examinations of relationships though not likely to have broad appeal. (C+)

The downfall of nearly all comedies is that Silliness is so often used as a substitute for humor. In this film, I never felt embarrassed for any of the characters, who were allowed to seem like genuinely real people in the context of a genuinely humorous development. It was also literate, which was nice given the thread of narrative running through the thing. I felt that simply reading the script would have been a nice rainy-day read, but at the same time, the lines were not literarily pompous or turgid.

Altogether, this was not a great film---but nicely, nothing happened in it to make it a bad one, either. If you're fed up with variations on same-old-same-old, sit back and just let this film flow over you.