Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.
The movie stars '90s indie stalwart Eric Stoltz as Lester Grimm, who's locked in a pattern of gumming up his love life with displays of obsessive jealousy. Stoltz thinks that his current girlfriend, Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), might be the one, which makes it all the more intolerable when he lays eyes on her ex, a cool-stepping novelist named Dashiell (Chris Eigeman), and can't stop wondering about Ramona's past. Lester ends up joining Dash's encounter therapy group, the better to find out whether the guy is obsessing over Ramona and to learn choice details about their past together. Of course, in order to disguise his identity, he has to refrain from talking about his own problems in therapy, so he borrows the problems of his best friend, played by Carlos Jacott. Then, when the process inevitably leaves him feeling more confused than ever, he winds up getting Jacott to join the group so that Jacott can pretend to have Stoltz's problems. Jacott just about steals the movie, especially when, taking on the assignment of pretending to be someone else with the deranged commitment of an idealistic Method actor, he turns up in the group earnestly discussing Stoltz's self-perpetuating neuroses in an outrageously bogus British accent. Mr. Jealousy is much lighter than Bamubach's more recent film, but it could be his funniest work. — Phil Nugent