February 15–22, 1996

movies

Last Summer in the Hamptons

Directed by Henry Jaglom
A Rainbow Picture

In Last Summer in the Hamptons, Henry Jaglom hasn't changed. He has just gotten better. His new film features an extraordinary ensemble cast of stage and film actors, directors and playwrights. They are brought together at a sprawling, slightly seedy estate in the Hamptons as members of a three-generation theater family headed by an aging but still radiant matriarch(the late Viveca Lindfors). An erstwhile actor, she runs a summer theater workshop filled with people who are all connected to one another, as are the members of Jaglom's cast.

The film is a new take on Jaglom's typical convoluted Mobius-strip constructions: inventive (if sometimes preposterous) comedies of anxietyin which the actors' roles blur the distinction between real-life experiences and movie illusions. The relationships are complicated, but here goes.

Jaglom's wife, the talented Victoria Foyt (she also co-wrote the script with her husband), plays a successful Hollywood B-movie star who has come to learn to be a serious actor. She has a short fling with the matriarch's son, an actor/ director played by Kristoffer Tabori (who is, in reality, an actor-director and Lindfors' son). Jaglom himself plays a minor role, doing his usual nudnick schtick as Victoria's down-at-heels low-budget filmmaker-lover. The real-life playwright Jon Robin Baitz (in a fine acting debut) plays Lindfors' playwright-grandson, whose father, acted by Andre Gregory, a theater director in the film and in reality, cannot accept his son's gayness. Andre Gregory's real son, Nick Gregory, takes the role of a self-serving actor who plays musical beds with Baitz's character and his unhappy sister (played by Melissa Leo, who has appeared in three of Jaglom's movies). True to the intricate quasi-incestuous nature of all of these relationships, Melissa is lubriciously over-fond of her brother. To complicate things further, Ron Rifkin, a well-known actor in life and in the film, has played principal roles in two Baitz hits in New York (Three Hotels and Substance of Fire).

The camera moves among the different groups and alliances, observing each one's squabbles, betrayals and rivalries about their craft and troubling co-dependencies. The rhythm of their interweavings reflects Jaglom's propensity to intersperse documentary and apparently improvisational conversations with interview-like disclosures (in films like Eating and Venice/ Venice), and it's all played out as if everyone had escaped from a loony adaptation of a Chekhov play. Of course, Chekhov is invoked — first, by the presence of Andre Gregory, who directedthe recent stage production Vanya on 42nd Street that was filmed by Louis Malle, and additionally, by Brooke Smith as one of his workshop protegees. Smith played Sonya in the Malle/ Gregory Vanya.

Along the way, we are treated to some marvelous sequences of Foyt in Stanislavskian animal imitations as well as clips and enactments that recapitulate Viveca Lindfors' wonderful career in both Hollywood and on Broadway.

Although often compared to Woody Allen for his tendency to be the narcissistic center of his meandering contemplation, and sometimes seen in a Godard-like pose of director as unlovable, irritating "bad guy," Jaglom takes a back seat in Last Summer. He allows his sophisticated, vivid and artsy cast to live on multiple levels of theatrical self-expression and authentic feelings while having fun with their roles and relationships. The continuous intersection of reality and fantasy blend perfectly in this "janglum" of a Midsummer Chekhovian Sex Comedy. In Last Summer, the usual components of edgy wit and manic energy have struck the right balance and it works.

—Ruth & Archie Perlmutter