A work of fiction freely intermixing real and written confessions of bourgeois women’s neurotically distorted self-images and food obsessions, Henry Jaglom’s 1990 movie Eating can elicit a feeling of binging and purging at once.
Structurally sluggish, Jaglom’s set piece transpires entirely in a Los Angeles manse, incorporating a lazy subplot of film-within-the-film allowing Jaglom to intersperse cutaways of first-person monologues and linger on faces while maintaining a documentary rhythm. A conceit removing it from realism, Jaglom populates it almost entirely with attractive women approaching midlife, attending a triple birthday party as a pretext for sharing their food obsessions—almost tediously, food substituting for love, attention, men and God—defined by conspicuous male absence and pitiable spiritual starvation.
Jaglom fills the house with actresses such as Lisa Richards (One Life to Live), Mary Crosby (Dallas), the always queasily real Gwen Welles (Jaglom’s A Safe Place and Nashville) and Frances Bergen as well as non-actresses Jaglom recruited from Overeaters Anonymous. With the possible exception of the Brenda Vaccaro-like Marlena Giovi—who hides any excess below her neck well—none of this bevy is heavy. Jaglom’s not interested in bread-and-butter dieting problems—with women unhappy, or even nonchalant, about their objectively fat bodies—but in food obsessions, the mental illness of fat women trapped inside thin bodies. Jaglom’s time capsule catches a generation of Hollywood women who, absent the proper affect and stuffed full of feminism that contradicted their upbringing, talk casually, guiltlessly about their abortions, but bawl over chocolate and pass a plate of birthday cake around the room with no takers, lest anyone see they want it. Jaglom intelligently suggests the two sicknesses are related.
Neither the interjection of the international nor the intergenerational (Bergen plays Lisa Richards’ mother) provides relief from the monotony of neurotic misery. Even some of the heartfelt admissions come off as scripted fauxbia, à la Real World, such as French dish Nelly Alard sunbathing nude by the pool with a typically Gallic absence of self-consciousness one moment, then complaining that she always felt “too big,” alienated and awkward the next. Bergen’s character, a former model of the excessive-cocktail generation, scolds the women for their self-flagellation, only to admit that her contentedness comes with accepting adultery as part of the male nature. Oh, any cake left?
At it’s best, when Jaglom attempts a Robert Altman manqué, the eating disorders seem inseparable from regional West Coast nutty-ness. Women assault each other with nurf-material weapons, yell into silver plastic shells to relieve aggression, believe in the power of crystals and dress ridiculously theatrically. Welles delivers the performance of the film in an upstairs bathroom-turned-vomitorium when she admits sabotaging all the friends in her life for reasons she can’t fathom.
The 20th anniversary edition DVD release includes an episode of Jaglom’s fellow female flatterer Phil Donahue’s talk show and, ironically, a select group of the most telegenic of the movie’s actresses. A greater moment than anything in the movie appears here, when a vivacious black woman with a twist of pearls interrupts Jaglom’s more-sensitive-than-thou spiel about food and eating being “a metaphor for how hard it is to be a woman in this society.” She speaks truth to psychobabble: “There’s no difference between being thin and heavy—it’s you.” She talks about being 78 pounds on her wedding day and having gained weight ever since (“I’m now heavy. I’m happy!”). She ends with a line no Altman writer could top: “If my husband had enough money to buy me more clothes as I got larger, I’d keep right on eating!” She brings down the house.
That recalls the Alfre Woodard eruption on bee-pollen-as-snake-oil in Health. It’s the deliciously Altmanesque moment Jaglom may have sought but never found.
