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Kissing Jessica Stein
Try It, You Might Like It
"Kissing Jessica Stein" light, entertaining, worth a look?
So, who kissed Jessica Stein? Helen Cooper did, permitting the “something new” buzz that’s giving the New York-based romantic comedy Kissing Jessica Stein a shot at a larger audience than its initial guesstimates. It got the nod at the LA Film Festival 2001, and surely the promoters saw the time as ripe for a promotional push.
After all, the popular media have paved the way, consistently, for gay themes or at least adornments – some, admittedly, gratuitous or cheap shots – for decades now. It was a short hop from the trendy, media-oriented cocktail parties of the activist sixties, studded as they were with token (“presentable” or otherwise) gays and lesbians, to the now-frequent representation (of all kinds) throughout the electronic and print media. Boomers easily recall when Archie Bunker staggered with the realization that his much-admired butch buddy is a fag.
My sister told me to catch Kissing Jessica Stein when I was in New York this past February. She loved it. I tried when I saw it advertised in jello-colored lights on the marquee at a theatre in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on my last afternoon in the Empire State, but I was too late by 20 minutes. I let it go, thinking I’d make do with a DVD down the line. The film’s release was limited, so I doubted it would play in Vermont.
North Avenue came through for me, however, and I saw Jessica kissed (and kissing back, sort of) at the cheap seats in Ethan Allen Cinema. The sparse crowd yukked it up. Me, too. I draped a knee over a seat and let the movie come at me in the familiar, breezy way the major network sitcoms have of washing over the viewer.
I saw it the next night, too, and I read what I could as a sort of prep for this piece (and, also because it was fading, the way much of the media we routinely consume to stall the brain or distract the tight chest is designed to do). I liked it more than I had initially. The first night disappointment I felt was that KJS had little more impact or lingering reverberation for me (and I’d guess anyone else) than, say, an evening with the “Friends” or a romp with the Romanos (“Everybody Loves Raymond”).
On the car ride home I was thinking how much Jessica Stein (lead and writer/producer Jennifer Westfeldt) reminded me of Lisa Kudrow and how, from a certain angle, Helen Cooper (co-lead and writer/producer Heather Juergensen) resembled Ray Romano’s wife Deborah. It was as if the movie were a TV product which had moved with no fanfare into a Cineplex and found it to be a homey, natural fit.
But there’s nothing remarkable about that because it’s a safe bet that the two engaging actress/writers who conceived and nurtured “Jessica” from its origins as a theatrical sketch on “dating hell” written in the Catskills a few years back have apparently logged as much time with the tube as the rest of us.
Movies are the most collaborative medium and never more so than here. Reading an interview with Westfeldt and Juergensen as I did at eclipsemagazine.com, reveals that, in addition to directors, studio types (it was optioned for awhile before the women bought it back) and all the other professionals, audience input seems uncommonly key in shaping this film’s final product.
And among the film’s weaknesses that nagged at me is the sense I had that people with clipboards and penlights were poised behind the movie screen, and every time a laugh erupted in the audience, they high-fived one another and made a note. I mean, the film has the feel of being too carefully worked and controlled, calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator without driving away more persnickety types.
What led up to the night Jessica Stein got a great big smacker right on the lips?
Jessica Stein, a copy editor for a trendy publishing outfit, finds she has no love in her life save for her devotion to language which is immaculately written, certainly, and conventionally polished and articulate when spoken, thank you very much. Knocking on the door of her 30th birthday, an age in our culture that signals full-fledged adulthood, Jessica feels a little like Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby): “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” Weary of the company and the dubious charms of a New York, he heads back to his mid-western roots. Jessica, however, is very much a New Yorker. She’ll stay in the Big Apple, but she wants to find and manage the next phase of her life, and for her this appears to mean life with the right guy and all that follows.
Getting nowhere with the men she’s meeting (and they are a dreary lot from the brief look at them we get), she keeps a date she made with a woman whose personal ad appealed. She loved the ad but because a woman had written it, she proceeded carefully and kept the “option” she is about to explore very much to herself.
The other half of the equation is Helen Cooper, an assistant curator in a lower Manhattan gallery. Regardless of (or because of) her sexual athleticism with men, she feels a frustrated emptiness and enlists a gay friend’s help in crafting a personal ad that will hook her up with a woman. They settle on a passage from literary giant Rainer Maria Rilke, hoping to avoid wasted time with unsuitables. (That would do it.) Luckily Rilke is a favorite with Jessica.
So we’re off.
The two pretty girl-girls provide some real laughs trying to imagine and act-out what they think the roles might be between two women. We get fumbled, competitive door-openings and two fists thrusting greenbacks at a cabby. As they move through the preliminaries, the familiar stereotypes emerge. Jessica’s more repressed nature is expressed in her quirks (no stomach-touching) and in her micro-managing (bringing along a catalogue of female sexual appliances on the eve of what might be their first complete love-making, relieved to know that “lesbians accessorize”).
Helen is more spontaneous and free-floating, eager to dispense with logistics, set-ups and certainly appliances, saying that the one thing they don’t have to work with, so to speak, doesn’t figure absolutely or even prominently in where pleasure lies for a woman. Does Jessica agree? Yes, she says she does, but still, this may take awhile.
Intermixed with the love story are friends and family, Jessica’s primarily. Her relationship with her mother (Tovah Feldshuh) has a moment fairly late in the story that suggests by its tone what another movie about two women together, each for the first time, might be like. But this touching variation in the dominant style passes.
Aside from Mrs. Stein, Jessica’s world is fleshed out by ex-boyfriend and current boss Josh (Scott Cohen), her very pregnant co-worker and friend Joan (Jackie Hoffman), her brother, her grandmother ... In Helen’s Chelsea world we see the gallery, enjoy the quips and encouragement of her gay couple friends Martin (Michael Mastro) and Sebastian (Carson Elrod), one of whom tells her she’s an “affront to the gay community.”
But I don’t feel that the film is an affront. It doesn’t have the gravitas or complexity or firmly argued stand that can provoke, enrapture, incense or awaken an audience. And the women who wrote it and acted it have said so, straight out. They thought they had stumbled onto a topic that would be engaging in contemporary culture: can two straight women (such as themselves) extend a close, caring relationship into the sexual realm? Will it work? Is sexuality, in fact, as immutable an identity as many strident believers have insisted? Or is it more along the lines of that perennial mothers’ dinnertime urge of “try it, you might like it!”
Also, to lighten up a tad, both Westfeldt and Juergensen were primarily concerned with delivering a romantic comedy with what has been called a “risqué hook.” They want to suggest there is much to be gained by moving beyond self-imposed perimeters through trying on new behaviors, new identities, so to speak. Presumably they feel this sort of “appliance” might serve in the search for one’s truest self. So, for them, it’s a film not so much about lesbianism or bisexuality; it’s about risk-taking to avoid trapping oneself in an undernourished little box-world.
This identity try-out thing seems new, historically speaking. I remember thinking in the 1970’s that it took so little for a Vermont farm-boy to become a surfer-boy. A tan, certain tee-shirts, some additional vocabulary and, well, he’d just about be in Bodega Bay, California, scanning the horizon, next stop Hawaii.
Today, of course, some might say that our frequent indulgence in optional life-styles is a dodge, a frivolous digression from the very real business of nurturing a self that is longing “to become,” and that holding off this necessary adult work guarantees the disconnect we all fret about. A neurotic bind, then.
But films have been and will be made about more than the surface of a sequence of behaviors. Experiencing one of those films encourages self-growth and eases one’s fearful resistance to it.
To its credit, Kissing Jessica Stein never pretends to be more than what it is: energetic, entertaining and light enough not to spoil the fun. It succeeds according to its own aspirations.
As for how it all ends, well, it feels rushed to me, almost as if the actresses just wanted a wrap. But really I’d think they’d say they were just ready for the next role.
Kristen Pettit is a retired English teacher living with her partner in Underhill.