Noah Baumbach’s Mr. Jealousy (1997) is a movie about insecurity, relationships, and literary self-loathing—all subjects that could make for a solid character study if the characters weren’t so thoroughly unlikeable and the dialogue didn’t sound like it was ripped from a rejected New Yorker cartoon. It’s a film that desperately wants to be witty and urbane, like early Woody Allen with less sex appeal and more whimpering. Instead, it lands somewhere between a coffee-stained grad school essay and the internal monologue of a man slowly unraveling because his ex-boyfriend once wrote a short story about boats.
The plot, if you can call it that without laughing, centers around Lester Grimm (Eric Stoltz), a part-time substitute teacher, part-time aspiring writer, full-time anxiety-riddled man-child. Lester is dating Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), a museum tour guide with the patience of a saint and the romantic standards of a malfunctioning Roomba. When Lester learns that Ramona once dated a semi-famous writer named Dashiell (Chris Eigeman, whose every line drips with smugness and cologne), Lester begins spiraling into jealousy, doubt, and half-baked sabotage.
Now, let’s be clear—there’s nothing inherently wrong with a neurotic protagonist. But Lester isn’t charmingly insecure. He’s a sentient red flag wearing tweed and looking for reasons to be miserable. He lies to Ramona, stalks her ex, and eventually joins a therapy group under a fake name just to get closer to the guy. It’s not love—it’s romantic espionage with less skill and more mumbling. And Baumbach wants us to laugh at this. To find it adorable. Quirky, even. But watching Lester whimper through his insecurities is like watching a cat puke on a typewriter—it might be vaguely creative, but it’s not something you want to see more than once.
The central conceit of Lester infiltrating group therapy just to spy on Ramona’s ex is the kind of premise that could work in a zany comedy or a biting satire. But Mr. Jealousy doesn’t go big. It goes sad. Baumbach directs like a man afraid of emotion—everything is downplayed, mumbled, and filtered through a haze of irony and half-smiles. The scenes have all the emotional stakes of a casual brunch where everyone secretly hates each other but is too polite to say anything. You keep waiting for something—anything—to break through the beige fog of detached smugness, but all you get are more monologues about how hard it is to be a white man with feelings in Brooklyn.
Eric Stoltz, to his credit, commits to Lester’s descent into pathetic obsession, but the character is such a wet blanket of neurosis that you start rooting for his therapist to just recommend a restraining order and a kick in the shins. Annabella Sciorra tries her best to bring warmth and depth to Ramona, but she’s written like an idealized muse for sad literary men—a woman who exists solely to be misunderstood, idolized, and eventually disappointed. Her character arc begins and ends with “patient girlfriend,” and the fact that she doesn’t leave Lester the minute he starts acting like a jealous raccoon in a therapy circle is the film’s least believable twist.
Chris Eigeman as Dashiell plays the same character he always does: smug, well-dressed, vaguely British despite being from Connecticut, and so insufferably composed you start to root for Lester’s delusions, if only to watch Dashiell get hit by a poetry truck. He’s less a character and more an archetype—the cool ex who makes the protagonist feel like a sweaty sock puppet by comparison. The film wants us to hate Dashiell a little, love him a little, but mostly just sit in quiet awe of how articulate everyone is while being emotionally constipated.
The supporting cast includes Carlos Jacott, Marla Sucharetza, and Peter Bogdanovich, all of whom are wasted in roles that amount to little more than neurotic wallpaper. Bogdanovich shows up as a therapist who somehow doesn’t catch on that one of his patients is lying about his identity and motivations, which either makes him the worst mental health professional in New York or a meta-commentary on how nobody in this movie actually listens to each other. Either way, he deserves hazard pay.
Tonally, the movie is confused. Is it a farce? A romantic drama? A therapy-sploitation satire? Baumbach keeps his cards so close to his chest that you wonder if he’s holding anything at all. Every scene feels like it’s building to a punchline that never arrives or a revelation that evaporates on contact. The result is a 90-minute exercise in narrative edging, where nothing quite happens and no one quite grows, but everyone talks a lot about how complicated everything is.
Stylistically, it’s got that mid-‘90s indie film glaze—grainy cinematography, sparse score, and lots of urban exteriors where characters walk and talk like they’re trying to seduce each other with syntax. But instead of charm, it reeks of effort. Every line of dialogue sounds workshopped to death. Every glance is rehearsed. It’s like watching a group of people act out a therapy session written by a playwright who’s never been to one but read a pamphlet once while waiting for an STD test.
Baumbach has since gone on to make better films (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) where his penchant for self-loathing, brittle dialogue, and generational trauma actually pays off. But in Mr. Jealousy, he’s still in his training wheels phase, throwing semi-autobiographical tantrums on screen and expecting us to find them poignant. It’s less artful introspection and more an open mic night where the performer forgot his notes but insists on winging it because “the awkwardness is part of the experience.”
By the time the movie limps to its finale—complete with a half-hearted romantic reconciliation and an “emotional” epiphany that amounts to “maybe I’m the problem”—you feel less moved and more relieved. The characters may have learned something. You, the viewer, have learned never to let a Baumbach protagonist borrow your Netflix password, your couch, or your girlfriend.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 sad tote bags.
Watch it if you enjoy watching emotionally stunted adults sabotage themselves with the grace of a drunken poet at a wine mixer. Everyone else: skip this therapy session disguised as a movie and just go scream into a scarf at a Brooklyn deli—it’ll be quicker, cheaper, and more honest.
