Ira & Abby Leave Romance at the Alter
Ira (Chris Messina) is neurotic psychology student with so many issues 12 years of therapy hasn’t been able to make a dent in them. Abby (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a charming free spirit not really sure what she wants to do with her life, better at fixing her friends problems than she is at convincing customers to purchase gym memberships at the local New York club in which she works.
Jennifer Westfeldt and Chris Messina in Magnolia Pictures' Ira & Abby
These two opposites meet by chance, click immediately, meet one another’s parents within hours and marry only a short few days after that. All seems perfect, but when Ira finds out this is Abby’s third marriage things swiftly begin to fall apart. Soon they’re both in couples counseling with a succession of psychoanalysts, getting divorced from one another almost as quickly as they entered into matrimonial bliss in the first place.
But neither one proves to be able to get along without the other, and as fast as they were divorced the eccentric twosome soon find themselves back once again walking down the aisle. Meanwhile, Abby’s voiceover artist father Michael (Fred Willard) and Ira’s hard-boiled analyst mother Lynne (Judith Light) start a torrid affair putting their own multi-decade marriages in jeopardy. It’s all almost too much for the newlyweds to handle, both of them starting to wonder if a life together forever really means having to say, “I do.”
The new romantic comedy Ira & Abby written by co-star Westfeldt (who also penned the simply wonderful Kissing Jessica Stein) and directed by Robert Cary (Anything but Love) is a cute if cloying feature-length sitcom that’s a pleasant diversion and nothing more. While there are some delightful moments overall this is pretty familiar stuff, none of it really going in a direction we haven’t seen both before and better.
It doesn’t help that I didn’t care for Ira at all. Messina is a nice enough actor (he was great during the final season of Six Feet Under) but this character isn’t at all likeable. The guy is a self-involved overanxious mess. He’s every Woody Allen cliché in the book, so jittery and irrational I kind of wanted Abby to just haul off and slap him. I never bought that these two would find a way to end up together, and considering this whole thing is supposed to be a romance that’s a pretty big problem the film can’t ever recover from.
Thankfully, the rest of the cast is pretty much an all-around joy. Westfeldt is Abby in every conceivable way, lighting up the screen the first time she walks into the frame. Willard turns on the usual hysterically satirical charm, Frances Conroy has moments of touching poignancy as Abby’s mom Lynne and Robert Klein is suitably gruff as Ira’s man-of-few-words father Seymour.
But the real delight here, somewhat shockingly, is former Who’s the Boss? And One Life to Live television star Light. She’s a hoot, vamping it up considerably as the hot-tempered mother who suddenly discovers a soft spot for jingles and radio vocal work. I just loved her in this, and every time she came on screen I just couldn’t wait to see what the actress was going to do next.
She, like a lot of the people in the film (including Jason Alexander, Maddie Corman, Donna Murphy and B.D. Wong), deserves better, however, and as much as I delighted in her I just couldn’t quite get past the triviality of Westfeldt’s script or over just how much I didn’t care for Ira. I wanted to love the movie as much as the two leads kept falling head over heels for one another, but no matter how hard I tried it just didn’t happen. In the end, Ira & Abby wound up being just as big a frustrating failure as one of their multiple marriages, the fact of which is every bit as disheartening as it probably sounds.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
