MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Naked in New York’: Simple Pleasures

Dan Algrant, making his feature-film debut as co-writer and director in “Naked in New York,” doesn’t try to wow the audience with a lot of semi-autobiographical Angst. He’s not big on wow in general. He’s the kind of filmmaker who works in safe, methodical strokes, and the safeness is both calming and clotting in a filmmaker so new. He’s made a friendly, disconcertingly tame debut movie.

Algrant may be short on Angst but his film still carries the flavor of something closer to his concerns than the latest grosses. It’s about what happens when two college lovers, Jake (Eric Stoltz) and Joanne (Mary-Louise Parker), live together in Cambridge, Mass., after graduation and then apart when their careers conflict. He’s an aspiring young playwright--aren’t all young playwrights in the movies aspiring?--who makes the move to New York City when one of his plays is produced Off-Broadway. She’s a photographer who stays behind in order to work for a well-connected gallery owner (played by Timothy Dalton, who has the kind of brittle British diction that really deserves a hearing on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” opposite Patrick Stewart’s).

The film’s time scheme, ranging from Jake’s voice-over reminiscences in the present to flashbacks of his loopy childhood with his single mom (Jill Clayburgh) to places in between, is complicated but lucid. We’re supposed to regard Jake’s coming of age as a kind of tall-tale jaunt. He’s an artist because he embraces his foolhardiness.

Stoltz has a shaggy grace and a couple of his confrontations with Parker’s Joanne have the tang of real spats. Their living-apart situation, with Jake periodically calling her in moments of distress and getting her answering machine instead, have a familiar horror. Algrant stages a good arty party scene, and there’s a sexual moment between Jake and his best friend Chris (Ralph Macchio) that is blessedly understated where leers might have substituted. Famous artist celebs like William Styron and Arthur Penn and Eric Bogosian keep popping up, and it’s fun to see them playacting in their element.

But the film is stolen by Tony Curtis, as Jake’s Off-Broadway producer, and Kathleen Turner, as the soap-opera diva who is all wrong for Jake’s play--and of course is cast in the lead. These two performers dig into their parts with such campy relish that they seem to be having an actor’s holiday. (This is what can happen when two studio-savvy players have a fling in low-budget land.) They burst the film’s carefully stitched seams, and the bursting is all for the best.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexual situations and language. Times guidelines: It includes mild sex scenes .

‘Naked in New York’

Mary-Louise Parker: Joanne

Eric Stoltz: Jake Briggs

Ralph Macchio: Chris

Tony Curtis: Carl Fisher

A Fine Line release of a Martin Scorsese presentation. Director Dan Algrant. Producer Frederick Zollo. Executive producer Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Dan Algrant and John Warren. Cinematographer Joey Forsyte. Editor Bill Pankow. Costumes Julie Weiss. Music supervision Bonnie Greenberg and Jill Meyers. Production design Kalina Ivanov. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

* In general release.