Henry Jaglom’s Manhattan is a Bygone Cabinet of Discursive Curiosities

The Metrograph is staging a revival of Henry Jaglom’s “Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?” (1983) following the premiere of its 4K restoration at last year’s New York Film Festival. How I wonder, will contemporary filmgoers react to the picture’s time capsule of Manhattan? Those who call the Upper West Side home must be peculiarly taken with how much their neck of the woods has been transformed over the past four decades.Notable changes include the removal of James Earl Fraser’s “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt” (1939) from the front steps of The Museum of Natural History, a monument that can be glimpsed in Jaglom’s picture. Cineastes of a certain age likely sat up upon seeing both the Cinema Study and Regency, arthouse theatres that have long closed their doors. Should you have difficulty believing that New Yorkers once lined up for a revival of Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bandwagon” (1953), this film offers proof positive.Another notable change in “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?” has to do with the fortunes of a performer who is listed during the ending credits as “Friend at Cafe” and in some sources as “The Philosopher.” But, there he is, a young Larry David, with a rumpled shock of hair not unlike that of Larry Fine from the Three Stooges, and an attitude that fans of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” will recognize. Mr. David is on screen for a few moments, busy pontificating, in his own distinctive way, about the nature of happiness.How much did Mr. David learn from his experience working with Jaglom? The British-born writer and director died this past September at age 87. The son of Jewish emigres who made their way to Manhattan when Jaglom was just a one-year-old, after attending the University of Pennsylvania he returned to New York City and studied with Lee Strasberg at the famed Actors Studio. This lead to a peripatetic career as an actor, popping up in television sitcoms and cultivating friendships with “New Hollywood” types like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, as well as befriending an old Hollywood icon in the form of Orson Welles.Jaglom took up directing upon seeing Federico Fellini’s “8-1/2” (1963). “The film changed my identity,” he told the journalist Robert K. Elder, and he began creating pictures whose point of pride was staying well outside the Hollywood mainstream. How much he stayed well outside his own ego is another matter and one that has long been a matter of contention. For every admirer of the man — and their numbers are not inconsiderable — there is an equal-and-opposite observer. The French director Louis Malle, for instance, stated that Jaglom “improvises almost completely. But excuse me, it shows.”So try watching “…Cherry Pie” without having “Curb Your Enthusiasm” nag at your memory. Like Mr. David’s HBO series, Jaglom allowed the actors to have free range over roughly stated stories or situations. The benefit of such an approach is that it doubles down on spontaneity, on unexpected tangents of wit and character. The drawback is the upending of narrative rhythm and the dilution of dramatic emphasis. A strong editor is a godsend for this kind of thing, as is a director with some sense of discipline.Neither of which is in much evidence in “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?” It’s a discursive, sometimes desultory, thing that contains a smattering of belly laughs and brief moments of unkempt poetry. Jaglom’s movie is more convincing in its milieu than in its characters. Too often we are aware of actors acting and, sometimes, fumbling their craft. This is especially true of the film’s star, Karen Black, who improvises with considerable energy but comes up short in establishing any kind of substance. She’s edgy to a fault.We’re introduced to her character, the flighty and paranoid Zee, just as her husband is packing his bags and abandoning their relationship. Striding down Amsterdam Avenue, she mumbles to herself in recrimination and takes a seat at a local watering hole next to a middle-aged social worker, Eli (Michael Emil), and his buddy, Mort (Martin Harvey Friedberg). The two men are rumpled, balding, and worse-for-wear. They can’t help but notice that the beautiful woman next to them is in distress. Eli reaches out in sympathy and therein begins an unlikely…well, calling it a “love affair” is putting it strongly.Wherein ensues a shaggy dog story about people who either over-intellectualize life or squander it on fripperies. Emil plays Eli as an analytical schlub given to scholarly musings, Welles shows up with an abominable Yiddish accent, and Manhattan is seen as a cabinet of curiosities that is sad, sorry and fatigued. There’s quirk aplenty in Jaglom’s film, but not much understanding and not an iota of rigor. “Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?” is a folly of mild attractions.

Henry Jaglom’s Manhattan is a Bygone Cabinet of Discursive Curiosities

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