Only in New York

...Instead, it's a starting point, since Ira and Abby get married a week after they meet and must deal with the consequences of their intemperate action...

...Their union also disrupts two other unions, one blissfully happy and the other entropically miserable...

...He has broken up with, and gotten back together with, his girlfriend four times in the previous year...

...Abby bears no relation to Jessica Stein, but Ira does: He's a therapized son of therapists who is in desultory training to be a therapist himself...

...At the same time, Ira has cause for his growing jealousy of just about everybody else on earth, since everybody else on earth gets the same attention from his wife that he does...

...It's therefore especially impressive that Abby, the character Westfeldt conceived and plays here, is an entirely different and yet entirely recognizable type...

...Still, the movie is entirely on Abby's side...

...But John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...

...Ira and Abby are both Jewish (though, as was the case with Elaine and George on Seinfeld, the filmmakers pretend Abby is a Gentile for some reason)— just like this writer and his wife, who is so Jewish that she is the daughter of a rabbi...

...I can't believe you won therapy...

...please note the past tense...

...Ira goes to a Greek diner I attend frequently and changes his order seven times, which is exactly what I do there...

...For that line alone, Ira and Abby deserves to live forever...

...But theirs isn't the only marital crisis in Ira and Abby...

...Her indiscriminate kindness is what draws the frozen Ira to her...

...The same analyst makes another appearance, along with six or seven of his professional ilk, in the movie's even more hilarious and fanciful climactic sequence...

...So, yes, Ira and Abby has special resonance for me...

...The thing is, Ira and Abby and I have a great deal in common...

...But—and I hope my wife will forgive me for this—I did fall deeply in love with this movie, and I did so instantly...

...Of the two, Ira is the character in need of salvation, even though he is convinced Abby is a bigger mess than he is...

...As Ira, an actor heretofore unfamiliar to me named Chris Messina blows you away...

...But it's still, by any objective standard, an absolutely wonderful little movie and a smashing tour de force for its lead actress and writer, who happen to be the same person...

...As it must in any romantic comedy, crisis erupts between the lovers, who are (needless to say) meant to be together...

...unlike other romantic comedies, marriage is not the logical conclusion of the story of the title characters...

...The similarities do not end there...

...Ira and Abby is a comic broadside against the talking cure and its practitioners, who seem to be the only other people in Manhattan besides the two of them...

...Ira's infuriating passivity finally gets the better of his impatient psychoanalyst, who dismisses Ira from his care in the movie's hilarious opening scene...

...Abby works at the Paris Health Club, which was built around an indoor pool eight blocks from my home, where I would beg my mother to take me swimming...

...her intuitive sense of people and her compulsion to feel rather than analyze marks her as one of nature's noblewomen...

...A few years ago she made a small sensation as the star and cow-riter of another little movie called Kissing Jessica Stein, in which she played a perpetually dissatisfied journalist who figures that the reason she can't find a man to love is that she's actually a lesbian...

...Jessica Stein is a superbly crafted character, a total pain who is nonetheless winning and touching because, like all memorable comic protagonists, she means no harm and is her own worst enemy...

...I can't because (a) I'm married already and (b) Ira and Abby is made up not of bone and sinew but of seven reels of celluloid...

...I should warn you that if you see Ira and Abby—and oh, how you should— you might not share my particular passion for it...

...Ira lives in a building where I once almost bought an apartment...

...And I was once married to someone after getting engaged after a week or so...

...He's funny and fragile like a young and unmannered Woody Allen, but far better looking and actually capable of expressing and conveying genuine emotion...

...She involves herself in the lives of anyone who will allow her to do so, offering sterling advice and loving counsel despite the fact that she is herself so incompetent she can barely tie her own shoes...

...The movie is set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live...

...He has written one paragraph of a doctoral dissertation, and otherwise seems to do nothing with his life...

...She's the person who immediately becomes everybody's best friend—the warm stranger on the plane to whom you find yourself telling all your troubles...

...Its protagonists are New York kids who grew up on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood I grew up in...

...Well past 30 and still living with her parents, she works as a membership salesman at a health club but tries to convince people not to waste their money by joining...

...Only when she joins the pink team, Jessica Stein and her new girlfriend find to their mutual distress that she is exactly the same difficult person she was before, with the same exacting standards and high-maintenance demands...

...And these three crises ripple outward and threaten to bring down the entire psychotherapeutic community of New York City...

...Jennifer Westfeldt is her name...

...And that's interesting, since Ira and Abby is about two people who fall for each other instantly...

...a deeply distressed Ira says after Abby charms their marriage counselor during her first-ever visit to an analyst's office...