Positive Reviews Have Henry Jaglom Worried

Henry Jaglom is worried. All kinds of people who never like his movies have been telling him they love his latest “New Year’s Day,” and he wonders if that’s a bad sign. Has he sold out? Has he gotten slick, glossy, false? What could he have possibly done to please people who usually regard his work as awkward, amateurish, over-personal or indulgent? Where did he go wrong? Or right?

“I always expect more resistance (to) my movies,” says Jaglom, about the early reactions at screenings. “Of course, I may still get it. . . . It even worried me to a point. Was I doing something to be likable? Manipulative?”

Certainly, it can’t be anything in the structure of the movie. It’s another roundelay of intense conversations about sex, psychology and relationships, all set up when Drew shows up early to take over a Manhattan apartment and spends a day with three young women roommates and friends who show up for their farewell party.

It’s not the production values, either. The whole movie was shot inside a Manhattan apartment with the camera occasionally peeking through a window at the falling snow.

And for those who simply don’t like Jaglom’s presence in his films, there is no relief. He is the central character, a jet-lagged Angeleno named Drew, as verbose and psychologically-driven as ever.

The geographical setting has shifted from Los Angeles to New York, and Jaglom has found himself a knock-out of a leading lady in slim, raven-haired Maggie Jakobson. But “New Year’s Day” is unmistakably a Henry Jaglom film and for Jaglom, that makes audience reaction usually predictable.

“I’m used to a third of the audience liking my movies a lot, a third of them being kind of unsure what they feel, and a third really hating them,” he says.

The movies that inspire these divisions seem unlikely candidates for hostility: gentle little comedy-dramas about romance or sex, done in a realistic “Actor’s Studio” vein that suggests John Cassavetes more than Woody Allen.

And, though some New York critics chide Jaglom for being an exemplar of California psycho-babble, he is a transplanted New Yorker himself, talking in brisk, helter-skelter Manhattan rhythms, with that little Big Apple whine in his voice that often comes from hailing too many cabs.

He believes careless critics often confuse his own viewpoint with that of his characters. “Since I try to have real feeling for my characters, frequently I’m accused of psycho-babble stuff--spacey California-speak that is not all a part of my life.

“I don’t believe it’s a question of geography. I don’t think it gets any better or worse in New York or L.A. I think that’s all a lot of self-involved cultural bull. We’re the same people. We’re dealing with the same culture. However, in New York, they make wise-ass remarks about L.A. . . . I think, out of defensiveness, insecurity. And we denigrate L.A., as we live in it. It’s part of our game.”

Jaglom, like many other observers, says his leading lady, Maggie Jakobson, is a big part of what makes his new film special. Jaglom met Jakobson several years ago while he was in New York editing “Always.” As he tells the story, he first saw her in an outdoor cafe where she was being harassed by some character wearing a rubber mask.

“The guy looked threatening, so I signalled across the way to her, silently, trying to suggest that (if she needed help, my friends and I were watching). And she looked back at me and indicated--I’m not sure how--’Thanks, I appreciate it, but I think I can handle this myself.’ And, in fact, she dealt with this guy in some funny way and he got up and left. We all applauded her. She bowed. And left. I didn’t speak one word to her.

“Then three months later, when I met her again, at a movie gathering, she said: ‘I was the one in the restaurant.’ ”

What happened next was a kind of creative symbiosis: Jaglom discovered that Jakobson was yoked to a philandering boyfriend--much like the one in “New Years’ Day”--then combined it with another complementary plot based on his experiences after the “intense, immobilizing pain” of his marriage’s breakup, which was the substance of his 1985 “Always.”

No one’s complained yet, as they did with “Always,” that “New Year’s Day” is too mundane and real, but Jaglom has an answer ready if they do: “One of the things that I find most destructive in films is these sex fantasies that have no relation to our real lives. Some critics . . . want films that are removed from reality, fancy sex fantasies they can wallow in. What I’m trying to do constantly is remind people what it’s really like out there, and that it’s OK to be just who they are.”

Including that third of the audience that hates his movies? “Sure.”