Flannel Pajamas
Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas is a study of the narrow but chaotic margin between self-realization and selfishness. The difference between the two can be just about impossible to discern, but in fact the first is ultra-conscious the second is, in good-hearted people at least, pretty dim. It's the pain that's carelessly, unconsciously inflicted that mortally wounds marriages.
Don't be fooled into thinking that this is yet another fly-on-the-wall movie in which self-absorbed characters like Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) chatter away about nothing much. The details may be banal, but they're also crucial, just as they so often are in real life. In the relatively crowded opening scene, we meet Nicole's friend, Tess (Chelsea Altman), who waltzes into a diner with a man who is neither her husband nor her fiancé (!). Stuart (Justin Kirk), who is the other half of Nicole's blind date, disapproves instantly of Tess's laxity. He makes this clear when the two are finally alone. It ought to be a dispositive signal that the two strangers face an uphill battle if they continue the relationship. But Stuart and Nicole are really taken with each other, and naively imagine that that's good enough.
Flannel Pajamasfeatures a lot of nudity in the first half, which makes the point that Stuart and Nicole are sexually compatible. That's important, because it's ultimately not enough, and when the nudity stops we know that the relationship is in trouble. And the trouble starts almost the moment that Nicole and Stuart get married. Driving back to New York from their honeymoon, Stuart overrules Nicole's request that they stop at a farm stand, on the grounds that he faces an early morning. The exit passed, he turns to her inquisitively and asks if she really wanted to stop. When you get to be my age, you know where this sort of heedlessness is leading. To reduce the couple's problems to a nutshell, Stuart says that he wants to protect Nicole, but she's not in any particular danger and it soon emerges that he wants to be the only person in her life. As he tries to cut her off from Tess and from her family, he gets rigid about an agreement, made before the wedding, that they wait two years before trying to have a child. Nor will he let Nicole get a Jack Russell terrier - he hates dogs. Nicole, for her part, deals with Stuart's domination in increasingly passive-aggressive ways. She does not speak up for her needs, but she's eager to express her resentment.
Things are complicated by differing backgrounds. Stuart is Jewish, and Nicole's Catholic family is overtly anti-Semitic. (Her mother (Rebecca Schull) tells him in one shocking scene that she believes every negative stereotype about "the Jews.") Not particularly religious at the outset, Nicole takes up elaborate bedtime prayers as her comfort with Stuart frays.
If it were up to me, every young couple would have to see Flannel Pajamas, because it presents a comprehensive range of the problems that most marriages must resolve in order to succeed. Stuart and Nicole are good-hearted people with no unsavory habits. Stuart is upright without being prim, and Nicole is generous and supportive, at least at the start. They can be forgiven for thinking that great sex and good intentions are all it takes to make a relationship work, but their failure is an object lesson for real lovers to learn from. Any man who comes away from the film thinking that it's not particularly worth talking about ought to be written off the list of any independent woman, and any woman who defends Nicole one hundred percent is certain to cause the average sensual man a great deal of grief. Mr Lipsky pulls off the neat trick of providing his principal characters with highly-developed individuation while endowing each with the more characteristic weaknesses or his or her gender. Stuart and Nicole aren't like anybody else, but they're not unusual, either.
If Flannel Pajamas has a fault, I'd say that it's the story line that concerns Stuart's brilliant but troubled brother, Jordan (Jamie Harrold) . Jordan is very unusual, and he threatens to cloud the otherwise limpid narrative. His departure from the scene belongs in a tonally different movie. (I expect that Jordan embodies some undigested life experience of Mr Lipsky's.) If nothing else, though, Jordan's antics show how legato the rest of the film is.
I walked out of the Angelika into a day that, thanks to a freakish warm front, might have been a rainy afternoon in the early fall. It was extremely melancholy, and I felt uncomfortably vulnerable, as if my marriage, too, were in trouble. That's how powerful Flannel Pajamas is. It is so not "just a movie."
