EATING
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
EATING is a film by Henry Jaglom and features 38 women including Frances Bergen, mother of Candace, widow of Edgar, and survivor of the Edgar McCarthy wars, as the voice of sanity and nonunderstanding.
Henry Jaglom is one of the world's great film makers and EATING is the best film he's ever made. Okay, so sue me, but that's my opinion and I'll stick to it. If for no other reason than that Jaglom is the only man, woman, or child making movies today who has made a movie about me. I am obese, have been all my life, and, while I'm not a woman, I can relate. Boy! can I relate. I mention this because I may be a shade prejudiced as I attempt to review this film for you. Forewarned and all that.
Bergen (I think) says: "Twenty-five years the secret subject of women was sex, now it's food."
Another women says: "I have yet to meet a man who excites as much as a baked potato."
And a third says: "I'm ok if I don't eat before, say, 11 PM."
The mise-en-scene is a birthday party for three women turning 30, 40, and 50 respectively. The house fills up with the women and their guests -- no men, although God knows men are there spiritually, psychologically, every way but physically. One of the guests is a charming French film maker who is doing a video on women and food. She starts taping and interviewing the party people. Much of the movie is these people telling the video camera about their secret lives vis-a-vis food and eating, eating and sex, eating and abortions, eating and men, eating and women, eating and mom or dad, eating and bingeing and bulemia and anorexia and diets and guilt. Eating becomes a metaphor, an entre into the neuroses, relationships, and guilty pleasures of millions upon millions of people in Western society.
What they say is so startlingly naked, true, earnest, and honest, it delights your soul and breaks your heart simultaneously.
Meanwhile, the principal characters are playing out various crises in their tangled lives as the party and the interviews surge ahead uncontrollably. Marriages and friendships founder, people wake up to themselves, things fall apart, and things come together, all in the context of the party.
This is heady stuff and the truly amazing thing is that it works as a film. Critics and viewers are inevitably want to compare EATING to SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE. EATING is better because it is at once more concentrated and more diffuse, without the distraction of James Spader. Jaglom makes us laugh and cry, shake our heads with disbelief and shake our heads with recognition. Even the resident, self-described bitch, bulemic, back-stabbing, treacherous, miserable bitch, is in the end, crouched on the bathroom floor, sympathetic if not likable.
These people are victims of the idea that we can be perfect, that perfection is not only attainable, but desirable. Some of them are perfect asses, but it is their imperfections that we love in them, that Jaglom's camera makes us love.
Jaglom's film have always been low-budget, ex-tempore affairs that breathe with more genuine life than all the big budget blowouts that Hollywood can churn out in a season. EATING is particularly alive and accessible. That one about his divorce -- sorry, don't have the name here -- in the end made me furious; maybe I just younger, but I think the quest for perfection there made people stupid and unlovable, made them spoiled rich kids. These people are almost all from the sunny side of the street, but my class-warfare bells don't go off this time.
EATING is being distributed mostly to art houses, but I urge you to see it if you possibly can. I guarantee you it will be one of the films on my ten-best list.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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