Julianne Nicholson — acting not at all like Annie Hall

A couple of weeks back, I read this interview from the Greencine main site with pioneer indie film-distributor turned writer-director Jeff Lipsky and I got a little shaky. Why that is will take a couple of graphs to explain.

Lipsky’s second feature, Flannel Pajamas is frankly inspired by the dissolution of his failed marriage. It’s a realistic work, deliberately made in the tradition of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage as well as the films of Lipsky’s late friend and mentor, John Cassavettes. Fittingly, it opened at Sundance in 2006, generating good-to-respectful reviews and netting an outright rave from Roger Ebert and a place on Andrew Sarris’s ten best list.

Not bad for a second time director, but that obviously wasn’t what made me weak in the knees. No, the truth was, with my retrograde tastes and my generally skeptical attitude towards kitchen sink/slice-of-life type movies, the only reason I even read the interview was that Jeff’s name rang a pretty big bell.

It seems that Lipsky’s marriage began during the time I was working as an assistant to his then wife — i.e., the character inspired by his ex-wife in Flannel Pajamas was pretty obviously inspired by my former boss. And not just a boss, but a boss who was initially extremely charming and friendly and spoke about all kinds of things, including her new marriage. Even though as far as I can remember I only met Jeff once and extremely briefly, at a screening of Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, my reaction was to quietly freak out. In no time, I contacted Jeff Lipsky and got ahold of his movie, which has been at a video store near you for about two weeks now.

To my relief, Flannel Pajamas was not the ultra-Sundancey exercise in masochistic self-revelation I feared, but an actual good movie — and it’s heroine not all that terribly reminiscent of the woman I remembered. I was already feeling like way too much of a voyeur, and the fact that this moving and sturdy small-scale character study had only occasional “aha” moments due to my oddly privileged position, was relaxing and interesting. I could tell a lot of was fiction, allowing the characters to take on their own lives and allowing for an actual story. And, after all, it was only a movie — though not just any movie.

It certainly wasn’t Annie Hall, a film some critics mentioned, and Julianne Nicholson’s Nicole is a far cry from the lah-dee-dah lady. Ironically enough, however, if you had asked me to describe my one-time boss while I was working for her, “Annie Hall” would have been the first two words out of my mouth, though I’m sure that says more about me about than about her.

Anyhow, when I finally spoke to Jeff, we started off with some of the obvious questions: Had a lot of people like me come out of the woodwork? (Yes. Among many others, the maid of honor from his wedding turned up at one screening in Los Angeles). And, much more obvious, had Jeff’s ex-wife and my ex-boss, now living outside the U.S., seen the movie? (Jeff hasn’t spoken with her in several years and doesn’t even know if she’s aware of the film, but he plans to get back in touch with her to invite her and her husband to an upcoming festival screening near where she now lives.)

After that, it was time to mostly forget that I knew anything of the story’s real-life background and just talk about the movie.

I started with a scene late in the film in which Stuart (Justin Kirk), the secular Jewish half of the troubled, mixed-faith, marriage to the Irish Catholic Nicole (Julianne Nicholson), begs for help in repairing the marriage from his mother-in-law (Rebecca Schull), a bright and artistic woman who is starting to show the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Ms. Schull, a familiar face from a number of films and the TV show Wings, is riveting, but that’s not what surprised me.

It’s that, not long on into the scene, the mother admits, quite calmly and without overt animus, to being an antisemite. “If you don’t love God, you can’t love anyone else,” she tells him calmly while munching on cafeteria food. Shot in an uninterrupted circular pan, it’s an extraordinary scene. Jeff explains that he deliberately resisted the convention of using emotional underscoring and even deliberately removed ordinary background sound effects. But that wasn’t the only thing that impressed me.

FtY: What blew me away about this scene is that this kind of revelation in a movie is nearly always a conversation ender, but here it’s a conversation starter. They keep talking and she’s almost friendly to him. I never seen a scene in any movie like that that I can think of.

JL: Well, thank you. The whole revelation aspect of the scene and the shocking nature of it was really always intended to be secondary to the fact that I created this figure to a tragic figure — a complex, contradictory figure. Somebody who has held on to beliefs dealing with hatred and antisemitism and and yet is dying from a horrible, debilitating disease.

I am equally, if not more, fascinated by the way Stuart responds, which is this controlled fury. I mean, how would he respond to a seventy-seven year old woman saying these things even if she wasn’t impaired or about to give herself over unwilling to dementia?

And, testimony to the power and ability of Rebecca Schull as an actress, although we shot it twice, everything you see in that seven minute scene is entirely from the first take. She’s amazing.

I did some research on this. Thank goodness, I haven’t had anyone in my family with Alzheimer’s, but when I spoke to people who knew more about it, they told me that, for the victim, it’s always the same. The worst part is at the point of onset. There are moments where you’re talking to your child on the phone — much like in the movie — and two seconds later you forget who you’re speaking to. Yet there are other days early on when memories come rushing back like a tsunami, and it’s almost liberating to say whatever is on your mind. Stuart’s mere presence triggers all these thoughts and biases and tenets that she remembers from girlhood, and she has to say them because she knows that the next time she won’t remember any of them.

FtY: I thought it was interesting that you mentioned the ending of Bonnie and Clyde in the Greencine interview. It occurred to me that most movies externalize the things that end relationships. Rhett and Scarlett are driven apart by the Civil War; Rick and Ilsa by the Nazi invasion of France and so on. And that’s really kind of a stand-in for what really drives most people apart, which is each other. Even in the indie world, Flannel Pajamas is fairly unusual.

JL: I thought that it would be a much more compelling story to more people who had experienced marriage, whether the marriage has endured or whether it’s failed, if the break-up weren’t triggered by something over-the-top or predictable like infidelity or spousal abuse. They are driven apart by each other, but not by an epiphany of an act. It’s gradual. And it’s because of who we are and our unwillingness to compromise.

The character of Nicole does, in fact, compromise a great deal during the early part of the film, but she does feel like there’s enough raw material there to satisfy the needs in her life, until there’s the straw the breaks the camel’s back.

FtY: Something else that sets Flannel Pajamas apart from most conventional movie love stories is the importance it gives to family and friends. Right from their first blind date — when Stuart mistrusts Nicole’s best friend, Tess (Chelsea Altman) — that’s almost the beginning of the end right there.

JL: It is. The whole thing is that Stuart is such a victim of ego running amok, and such a controlling individual without even realizing it, that as soon as Tess walks into the diner, he sees himself in Tess — he sees a rival in Tess. Much in the same way that he articulates that there’s this rivalry between him and his brother. The tragedy of that there is no rivalry, there never was.

FtY: And it goes in all sorts of directions. Nicole has a hard time with the drama caused by Stuart’s brother and his sort of unhinged behavior with his girlfriend. And Stuart basically decides that half of Nicole’s family he can stand and the other half he can’t.

JL: Yeah, I don’t know that it’s even half.

FtY: (Laughs). There’s some small segment he deems acceptable.

JL: It’s awful but it’s his choice. He’ll make the selection.

FtY: Changing the subject a little, it’s struck me that most people who make somewhat autobiographical films tend to be a little bit cagey. But looking at how you’ve discussed the film doing publicity and on the commentary track on the DVD, you’ve been pretty direct about it. Is it just because it’s been so long since what happened?

JL: First of all, I think that only about half of what you see in Flannel Pajamas is heavily rooted in autobiography. Obviously, though, the core relationship — my own marriage — triggered me to write the film in the first place.

But I thought that if there was honesty in that core relationship, I could embroider a largely fictional world around the two main characters. My ex-mother-in-law did not suffer from Alzheimer’s, was not antisemitic, and my ex-in-laws did not abuse their children physically, although my ex-mother-in-law was a very good amateur painter.

Certainly, I am more than willing to discuss — without naming names — specifics. Once again, it has to do with being honest about what you write and how you reflect on the past and how you serve up hope for the future. To this day, my marriage was the single most important relationship of my life. So, why not address it with honesty and respect and be willing to acknowledge it.

Just as in the film I think that Stuart gets a great deal out of the marriage, even though it fails. What I took out of that relationship allows me to become a better person. It allows me to become a better artist. I shouldn’t sell anything short. I shouldn’t hide behind the guise of fiction in discussing the film, or presenting the film.