"SHRINK RAP"

Because therapy, too, loves company, couch potatoes Eric Stoltz and Noah Baumbach analyze their latest comedy - and themselves

Don't let those Calvin Klein ads fool you - real obsession is never pretty. It can, however, be humorous, as director Noah Baumbach shows in his new film, Mr. Jealousy. The romantic comedy stars his Kicking and Screaming cohort Eric Stoltz as a tortured soul who investigates his girlfriend's past by joining her ex's therapy group - posing as his own best friend. Then, much like therapy itself, things get worse before they get better. Here, Baumbach and Stoltz (who's also the film's executive producer) sort out some issues of their own.

PREMIERE: What's it like for a jealous person to live in the age of *69?

Stoltz: I think modern technology can only fan the flames of the uglier side of obsessive personalities.

Baumbach: For every *69, for every caller ID, there's the blocking out. It's just building up the obsessions. Everybody's keeping themselves private but trying to figure out who the other person is. That's sort of amusing.

From Spellbound to Ordinary People to last year's As Good As It Gets and Deconstructing Harry, therapy's gotten a lot of screen time. Did any of those movies influence you?

Baumbach: In a lot of movies, everybody in group therapy is presented as some kind of a bozo. The bed wetter, et cetera. But I thought it was funnier to treat it seriously, given that we're already there under such preposterous circumstances. Therapy is tricky in movies because there's nothing particularly dramatic about it. The kind of breakthroughs that a lot of movies celebrate don't happen every day.

Stoltz: And they're rarely amusing.

Baumbach: If somebody gets injured in an action movie, they don't often get to the doctor. They'll sew their own leg back together, like Rambo. It's more fun to see people trying to handle things on their own than to see them going to a professional. But I find that the best romantic comedies make psychological sense. Like Groundhog Day. You repeat things over and over again until you get it right.

Stoltz: Or give up.

Baumbach: Exactly. But he can't give up! Ultimately, he has to let go.

Are 90's viewers more therapy-literate than audiences used to be?

Stoltz: Oh, sure. I think we live in a therapy-saturated society. It's rampant - self-help books. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to figure themselves out, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Baumbach: A lot of people are in therapy trying to figure things out. They have a lot to say that's pretty intuitive, but while they're doing that, there's that whole side they still don't know. They're covering something else...

Stoltz: But we still act like idiots.

Eric, as an actor, have you ever gotten lost in a story you've told in therapy and accidentally taken it to a fictional level?

Stoltz: Yes, I'm ashamed to admit. That's usually when my therapist says, "How do you feel about that?" and gets me out of story-telling mode and into that space inside my stomach that's not always comfortable. It's scary, and it's kind of silly and amusing at the same time. A little like stage fright.

Is it ever harmful for artists to go into therapy and iron out problems that- when all twisted and repressed- produce compelling work?

Stoltz: I think the more you know about your life and how you function in certain situations, and the more you know about human behavior the better off you are- both as a person and an artist.

Baumbach: I read that David Lynch said he didn't want to go into therapy, and I can understand why, seeing his movies...

Stoltz: Or David Cronenberg.

Baumbach: Or David Cronenberg. These people, their movies seem to come directly from the unconscious.

Stoltz: Yeah, it seems as if it's vomited right up from their subconscious onto the screen. I wouldn't want David Lynch or David Cronenberg to be in my therapy group. Making a film can be therapeutic in a way. Not necessarily at the time,but in retrospect. Or when a journalist asks what drew you to a role, you actually think about what, exactly, made you want to do the film.

What was that in this case?

Stoltz:[Laughs] I don't know.

- Jill Bernstein