VIDEO: The trailer for The Treatment
For his shaky, pretentious first film, A Safe Place (1971), Henry Jaglom conned Orson Welles into playing a magician. Now, decades after his 1985 death, Welles still opens every release from Rainbow Films: a snippet from A Safe Place in which Orson pulls a rainbow out of a box is the imprint of Jaglom’s company. For his dubious second picture, Trackers (1976), Jaglom befriended Anaïs Nin and coaxed her into providing a quote attesting to his artistic genius. That hyperbolic blurb, I recall, was seen all over NYC, as Jaglom pasted up Trackers posters throughout Manhattan.
The immodest, celebrity-hound Jaglom is the filmmaker others love to loathe, especially if they’ve seen him operate. I remember his taking over a panel of eight indie directors, holding forth in his me-me way while the other filmmakers steamed and stewed. On another occasion, he was surrounded by a bevy of his actresses (glassy-eyed Jaglom groupies) as he informed his audience how much he really, really loves women. His gals nodded on cue. Barf!
What’s more, he’s filthy wealthy. While far worthier filmmakers struggle with financing, Jaglom makes films on his own dollar whenever he likes, an astonishing 18 features to date. Okay, several of them are fairly funny: Sitting Ducks (1980), Eating (1990), Festival in Cannes (2001). But most are indulgent yuppie comedies featuring, amid the large ensembles, his marginally talented, show-biz-struck, LA-based friends.
Hollywood Dreams, which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, is — even for Jaglom — an enervating satire, the tale of a needy, hysteric, semi-homely crybaby from Iowa (the very irritating Tanna Frederick) who’s arrived in LA seeking her fortune as an actress. Although Margie’s a hapless mess, she’s taken in by an older gay couple (one of them played by Jaglom’s brother, Zack Norman), and she soon finds herself among the Hollywood set. For some reason, they take her artsy ambition seriously, even though she last acted in her high-school musical. In the film’s only successful comic scene, we watch the desperate Margie interject herself into a backyard-filmed junior-high class film project. Within minutes, she’s been kicked off the set, a disaster playing a nanny pushing a boy on his swing. “Sorry,” says the pre-teen girl director. “This isn’t really working out.” Otherwise? A character in Hollywood Dreams aptly describes the Santa-Monica-to-Malibu babble: “People sit in the hot tub and don’t do anything but talk.”
In his 1998 novel The Treatment, a clever satire about an insecure New York schoolteacher, Jake Singer, who gets smothered by psychoanalysis, Daniel Menaker creates a devilishly monstrous portrait of an over-the-top shrink. Ernesto Morales is a Dr. Strangelove control freak of Freudian therapy, pushing the client about, bullying him into asserting himself sexually, and then, after Singer has connected with a woman, getting off on the juicy coital details. In the film version — which, directed by Oren Rudavsky, also opens Friday at the Kendall Square — Morales loses his balls in the slowed-down, slightly distracted performance from Ian Holm. And why is he shown so often in long shot? If ever there was a character who demands screen-filling close-ups, it’s this crazed doctor. The Treatment is a disappointing little movie, in part also because of Chris Eigeman: miscast as Singer, he’s too bland and too befuddled a protagonist to care about.
