Irene in Time
Directed by Henry Jaglom
At the Quad Cinema
Runtime: 95 min.
IF HENRY JAGLOM was a trustfunded neophyte, he’d be acclaimed the King of Mumblecore—a genre that, it turns out, he pioneered several decades ago. Jaglom’s latest film (his 17th) is titled Irene In Time, the christened name of a sloop won in a poker game. It’s also the name of a curly-haired young woman (Tanna Frederick) whose now-deceased poker-playing father cast such an intimidating, loving, protective shadow over her childhood that she has trouble finding an adult male partner who can match his ideal.
Mumblecorers would think nothing of coddling Irene’s obsession, but Jaglom has a wiser sense of proportion—based in social values of a previous era—that makes him aware of Irene’s irritating stubbornness and exhausting impertinence. Jaglom follows Irene’s love-search as an existential sojourn—thus, Irene In Time charts her Jewish American Princess odyssey in the same agonizing/fascinating way that Eric Rohmer monitored Marie Riviere’s lovesearch in his 1986 masterpiece Le Rayon Vert (Summer).
Jaglom doesn’t have continental chic; he’s fond of the mundane way Americans pamper their feelings. Casual dining, card-playing, lounging-by-the-pool scenes capture banal truths. Jaglom’s unslick, casual method and happenstance humor always made him the emotionally authentic Woody Allen. But Jaglom is interested in capturing his friends’ neuroses more than his own, thereby creating the utterly compassionate cinema of Eating,Venice/Venice, Babyfever and the great Someone To Love. I warm to his movies even when impatient with them. When Irene records her Carly Simonesque songs with a therapy-group gaggle of women, when she plays kissy-face with friend of a lesbian friend, the odd moments feel emotionally genuine.
Against this Judd Apatow era, Jaglom’s exploratory filmmaking requires a personal response unhindered by TV formula. His semi-improvised vignettes go in unexpected places, often profoundly emotional directions: a Godardian scene where Irene’s bad date leads to a conversation with a teenage girl having dinner with her dad; a scene of heterosexual girl talk between Irene and her mother (Victoria Tennant) and a gay woman and her mother. Jaglom’s collected tangents are more interesting artifacts of femininity than the wan sisterhood of Beeswax.
Few movies have dealt with the crisis of women whose man-problems stem from daddy issues. (“Can you find somebody, or is it just your father that will feel that way about you?”) Most movies are so male-oriented that Jaglom’s female-orientation here is practically a breakthrough. Fact is, it’s not new. Karen Black, star of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, returns as a mother-figure whose own daddy’s-girl remembrance is simple and heartbreaking. Jaglom’s casting is always a bonus. He features Hollywood has-beens—Black,Tennant, Andrea Marcovicci, Reni Santoni, Zack Norman and David Proval—as part of the story’s texture. Their pasts and recent failures become ennobled because they are a measure of humanity. Mumblecore doesn’t bloom this way; it’s too green.
