Jenny

Time keeps ticking away, and popular culture slowly sheds off its excess fat, choosing to remember only a small sample of culture’s output in any given year. The digital world allows us to keep everything alive, but then you have the problem of too much stuff and not enough people to sort through it all.

Which is why it’s nice when you stumble on a forgotten gem like Jenny. Starring Alan Alda in one of his earliest roles, and Marlo Thomas in her first film role, Jenny is a deceivingly simple little romantic drama about an aloof filmmaker named Delano and the unassuming young (and pregnant) woman he meets in a park. They decide to marry, purely out of convenience and with a boatload of naiveté, only to realize too late what they’ve gotten themselves into.

Or mostly, what Jenny has gotten herself into, because Delano is just a complete dick. Together, Alda and Thomas inject a simplistic script with incredible character portrayals, and that’s what makes this a film worth watching. Seeing Alda be his affable self while simultaneously acting in the most selfish and clueless manner possible invites all sorts of speculation about who raised this guy. Jenny, meanwhile, is stuck in a predicament she never expected herself to be. There’s comedy in here, but just as much cringe-worthy tension between two people who just don’t belong together.

Jenny isn’t a perfect film- the ending is a bit too clean of a wrap-up, and, though it’s not surprising given the time period, Alda’s character is a lot better written than Thomas’. Still, their performances are on equal footing, and director George Bloomfield does a wonderful job with the script- it’s gorgeously shot and intimately directed, delivering a wonderful little slice of American Culture that we rarely get to see.