"Ira and Abby" is the type of relentlessly forced comedy, much like "Prime," that makes you truly appreciate the eccentric genius of Woody Allen. They can't all be gems (and a great deal of his films over the past decade sure haven't been) but when he's on, he nails that mix of New York anxiety with the sass needed to make it entertaining. "Ira and Abby" tries so hard to mimic his inimitable formula - messed up neurotic couples, inappropriate love affairs, the need to call therapy, ahem, "analysis" - that it never amounts to more than a subpar parody.
What happened to the sharp insight and hilarity that writer/actress Jennifer Westfeldt showed with the 2001 indie treasure "Kissing Jessica Stein"? It's gone with the wind here, replacing keen observations with grating, reprehensible ploys. And it doesn't do the movie any favors that the acting, by Chris Messina ("Six Feet Under") and Westfeldt as the titular 30-something characters, is just as sitcomy as the lines recited.
Ira is an overly sulky would-be psychologist who has been seeing a shrink for 12 years but hasn't made an inch of progress. Abby is a sales consultant who hates to exercise yet works at a gym, and is super-duper nice to everyone she encounters. That partially explains why she is drawn to Ira when he first walks into the gym and decides, after six hours of talking and a quickie, that they should tie the knot. Apparently they took the "what are you waiting for?" poster in the window, used to recruit people to pump iron, a bit too literally.
The film, directed by Robert Cary, suffers because we never buy them as human beings, let alone a couple trying to make it work. For starters, what exactly would sunny Abby see in cloudy Ira? She is a constantly chipper girl whom everyone adores (including her two ex-husbands) - she even helps a robber on a subway collect money from the bystanders, you know, to keep things cordial. Ira, on the flip side, is self-absorbed, mean-spirited and wildly annoying to everyone, including waiters. Desperation bringing two damaged people together for laughs is a shaky launching pad, especially when you introduce their even-more-screwy parents (Judith Light and Robert Klein as Ira's, Frances Conroy and Fred Willard as Abby's) and, as an added perk, a cross-couple fling.
"Ira and Abby" is simply not funny, and often veers toward the unpleasant. When Ira's dad sits him down for a heart-to-heart and tells him, of marriage, "You'll never really know someone," the words are likely to leave you confused as to what type of film this is. All I know is that it's certainly not one worth exploring.
