Naked in New York

Daniel Algrant – 1993 – USA

The kind of quirky, indie comedy-drama of which there were many in early 90s American film, (and in a great many of which Eric Stoltz seems to mysteriously appear too).  Here, Stoltz is a budding playwright, Jake Briggs, suffering from an extreme case of identity crisis.  With some equally severe mommy issues in his psyche, he has grown up to be far too self-conscious to be healthy, which has ill effects on his relationships with women and his ability to achieve his goals.  The play his best friend (Ralph Maccio) is shopping around Broadway for him – since he hasn’t the drive to do it himself – is pretentious and filled with his own anxieties about his father abandoning the family when he was a child.  An interested producer (Tony Curtis) begins mounting the play, his first decision being to cast a blowsy, glamorous actress (Kathleen Turner) in the lead even though she’s completely unsuited to it, and Jake copes by retreating into a series of increasingly surreal reveries, many of which feature theatrical and literary celebrities in cameos.  Overall, the film works sporadically; it seems to be several films in one, some of which are a little too familiar and are really glossed over more than accented by all the colorful supporting performances.  Stoltz is a weird actor; there’s something so icy and remote about him that it’s hard to relate to his characters at all.  That quality was used to good effect in films like The Waterdance (1992) and Killing Zoe (1994), but here it only prevents you from fully investing in the story.  I walked away kind of wishing the whole thing was much more about the chaotic production of the play and the Curtis and Turner characters, who are the only ones who seem to get that world and are having any fun.