Henry Jaglom is not the man he used to be. A profound and potentially disorienting change has taken place in his life. He is happy. So happy, in fact, that he no longer feels the need to be in his own movies. So happy that he finds his life “too boring” to bear the explication it has received in such films as “New Year’s Day,” “Always” and “Someone to Love,” in which Jaglom reigned over a kingdom of pain, surveying the wreckage of intimacy torn asunder.
For the reason, you need look no further than any of the numerous photos of his wife, Victoria Foyt, and daughter, Sabrina, 3, that plaster the walls of his cluttered Sunset Boulevard office. “All my life I’d wanted to have babies, but I never found the right person and the right circumstances,” he says, with a bit of wistfulness remembered creeping into his voice. “Then, at the age of 49, I finally did. And I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
But now, at 52, Jaglom isn’t about to disappear into a sinkhole of domestic bliss, for when he goes gaga over something-in this case babies-he doesn’t do it quietly. He makes a movie about it. His latest is, not surprisingly, “Babyfever.” And while the director stays behind the camera on this one, autobiography is never far away.
The film was conceived (so to speak) and co-written by Foyt. She also stars as Gena Wistrom, a woman who hears her biological clock ticking loudly. Gena is involved in a comfortable but less than passionate relationship with James (Matt Salinger, son of author J.D. Salinger). When Gena has reason to think she’s pregnant, she must confront not only her fear of commitment, but also her fear of compromising her ideals for a relationship that may be solid but is ultimately incomplete.
The movie, like its predecessor, “Eating,” is largely about women, for women and of women. This may seem like dangerous territory for a male filmmaker, but Jaglom is quick to point out that his art-house constituency always has been composed of women, and that he wouldn’t have made the film without the guiding hand of Foyt. Still, the “ticking clock” is an issue with which Jaglom claims a deep familiarity.
“The women’s movement, with all the wonderful things that it did, also created an unusual circumstance, which has become a problem: It told women that they should not give their lives away to men and family and instead have jobs and careers,” says Jaglom.
“What they didn’t mention is that their clock was going to keep ticking, and if you wait until you’re in your late 30s to find somebody to have a family with, you’re going to get desperate. It’s not fair. Women have a biological clock, while men only have a psychological clock.
“So it narrows in on them and finally it becomes very oppressive. And it’s new. Their mothers just had babies-they never even discussed it.”
Foyt, in the meantime, sees the movie as “a litmus test-if you take a man to this movie, you’re going to find out what level of commitment you’ve got because of the kind of discussion it engenders.” Which for a fair number of men probably qualifies “Babyfever” as the date movie from hell.
Foyt describes herself as an early victim-if that’s the right word-of baby fever. The idea for the film came to her after accompanying Jaglom to an NYU film school lecture in which he urged film students to make movies that were truly important to them. It got her thinking: What would she make a film about? She suggested the theme to Jaglom.
Originally, she says, the concept was to deal with the issue as seen through the eyes of a male (Jaglom) trying to understand it. That particular tack was discarded. “It would have been wrong,” she says.
To be sure, there is no one else in Hollywood quite like Jaglom, who may not be far off the mark when he calls himself “the luckiest man in Hollywood.” His movies are financed with European money, made for a relative pittance and generally make back several times their cost. He distributes them through his own company.
That adds up to a most unusual thing in Hollywood-total artistic freedom.
And that, his critics often have maintained, is his problem.
Jaglom has starred in many of his own films, often playing a self-absorbed director who can spend the better part of a film earnestly rearranging the furniture of his own emotional interiors-as do most of his other characters. There is lots of verbalizing. There is whining. If women have been his greatest partisans, they also have been his most outspoken critics.
“There are always people who think you’re not supposed to show the pain, just the solution,” he says. “In `Eating,’ (critics) said you’re showing all these women who are pathetic and trapped.
“But I think you’re supposed to show the truth. I don’t have any solutions. I show women truthfully and they can be weak and needy in a way that certain types of feminists don’t like.”
One of his favorite devices is the use of spontaneous interviews shot with non-actors. These testimonials are deeply confessional and can cause a certain edginess on the part of his audience-when it works, the experience is almost like eavesdropping on a conversation so personal, you feel embarrassed about overhearing it.
In “Venice/Venice,” the subject was romance as portrayed in the movies. In “Someone to Love,” it was loneliness. In “Babyfever,” which opened Friday, it’s the ambivalence about being childless at a certain age.
All of which has led to the phrase “self-indulgent” sticking to Jaglom’s shoe like gum.
But to Jaglom’s fans-and in the context of the relatively small, art-house niche he plays to, they are considerable-such “self-indulgence” translates into the courage to squarely address the quotidian issues of intimacy and emotional security that Hollywood has so devalued.
Some see his characters as endlessly spewing psychobabble. Others see this tendency to idle developmentally while speeding verbally as an indication of the extent to which people are both trapped and liberated by language.
“Those people who criticize me think those are my concepts,” he says. “People everywhere have these half-baked beliefs that they try to live with and identify themselves by, and the verbal is their way of dealing with that.
“The problem is, it’s hard to let people know that it’s their psychobabble and not your psychobabble.”
Jaglom seems equally bemused and put off by his critics. “The most conventional attack,” he says, “is `who cares?’ Especially when I’m in the films. They call it `navel gazing, being pathetic.’ When `Venice/Venice’ came out, one critic wrote `Jaglom on Jaglom again-who cares?’ He called it the `single most self-indulgent film in the history of cinema.’ “
This raises an obvious question. How much does Jaglom, in his various film incarnations, have in common with Jaglom himself?
“Henry’s movie persona is more about what he believes than what he already knows,” says Zack Norman, who has known Jaglom since the early days of his career and has appeared in a number of his films, including “Babyfever.” “The character he plays is usually groping for an understanding of aspects of life that Henry is already fully cognizant of.”
“What you see on the screen is an acute version of Henry,” says Foyt. “He’s very funny in life, but on the screen you’re seeing his neurotic emotional side. To me he’s one of the happiest, most centered people I know, though I don’t think you’d perceive that through his films.”
Says Jaglom: “This is acting, this isn’t me! A lot of it is making fun of myself. What I’m trying to do is go beyond my individual being and show something about our lives. I will say, though, that I’m not quite as mean as my character.”
Jaglom was born to a wealthy family in London, but reared in New York. His parents were European Jews, “elegant people, but not the least bit theatrical.” After studying acting with method mentor Lee Strasberg, Jaglom found his way to Hollywood, where he landed guest-star roles on shows like “The Flying Nun” and “Gidget.” His break into moviemaking came with the success of “Easy Rider,” which Jaglom edited and which opened the door for him to make his first film, “A Safe Place.” But after enduring a lengthy gap between his next two pictures, Jaglom grew disillusioned with the studio system and struck out on his own.
Hanging in Jaglom’s editing room is a large photo portrait of Orson Welles. Jaglom was a close friend of the late actor and director and is fond of quoting him. “Orson once told me, `The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,’ ” Jaglom says. “That was the most important lesson I ever had about making movies. And it’s why I like to make movies on small budgets.”
In the meantime, Jaglom is only half-joking when he predicts a mini-population explosion with the release of “Babyfever.” While the film was being shot, six of the actresses became pregnant, including two who had had major fertility problems for years. A production assistant would later have triplets, and Foyt, Jaglom’s wife, is pregnant again.
“They accused me of putting estrogen in the coffee,” Jaglom says. “I swear I didn’t do it.”
