Insomnia File #51: Ira & Abby (dir by Robert Clary)

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or Netflix? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

Oh Lord.

So, if you were having trouble getting too sleep last night, you could have turned over to one of the many Showtime channels you could have watched the 2006 film, Ira & Abby.

I doubt it would have helped though. Ira & Abby is one of those extremely cutesy little love stories where a neurotic guy meets a quirky woman and they spend the entire film having so many easily solved relationship problems that it’ll drive your anxiety through the roof just watching them.

Ira (Chris Messina) is the son of two psychologists (Judith Light and Robert Klein). Ira is planning on becoming a psychologist himself and, of course, he’s in therapy. At the start of the film, his therapist tells him that he’s beyond help and that he needs to do something spontaneous for once. Ira takes this to mean that he should go the gym.

At the gym, Ira meets Abby (Jennifer Westfeldt), who is quirky and universally beloved by everyone who meets her. (Westfeldt also wrote the script, which …. might explain a little.) Abby has a positive attitude and lives with her musician parents (Fred Willard and Frances Conroy). After Ira sees Abby somehow talk a mugger out of robbing everyone on a subway car, he decides that they have to get married. Free-spirited Abby agrees.

Marriage follows! Complications follow! Annulment and remarriage and more follows! Everyone ends up seeing a different therapist while, at the same time, Ira’s mom has an affair with Abby’s dad. And yes, it eventually does end with every character in the film gathering in one room and taking part in a giant therapy session. It’s exhausting to watch, largely because it just seems like all of the problems could be solved by people not being stupid or foolishly impulsive. Ira is neurotic to the point of no longer being sympathetic. Abby is so perfect and wonderful that you soon get sick of her and her positive attitude. Even Ted Lasso would tell her to turn it down a notch.

The most frustrating thing about the movie is that it features good actors like Chis Messina but it goes out of its way to sabotage them every chance that it gets. Out of the large and impressive cast, only Fred Willard and Judith Light manage to transcend the script. I would have loved to have watched a movie just about their characters.