Flannel Pajamas – Dir. Jeff Lipsky (Justin Kirk, Julianne Nicholson)

Indie films, art films, or whatever they are rightly called these days, will always involve the smartest people. They would have to be in order to 1) convince other smart people to see them vs. the litany of other more slickly produced, star studded alternatives and 2) to find a few people philanthropic enough to finance such a low risk venture. With this bias on my mind, I kind of trudged through the first 20 minutes of “Flannel Pajamas” forcing myself to at least “appreciate” the clever and hyper-lucid dialogue between the two main characters if not totally enjoying it. These early scenes are also peppered with an odd amount of sex and nudity that feels almost too real, without the benefit of airbrushed magazine sleek post-production.

“Flannel Pajamas” spends its entirety holding a magnifying up to relationship between two people, a mildly dysfunctional Catholic girl from Montana, and a nice but somewhat stereotypical Jewish boy from NY. But unlike every other Meg Ryan oriented relationship movie, and weighing in at a lengthy 2 hours of largely dialogue, “Flannel Pajamas” manages to capture the ugly warts of adulthood, marriage and the often massively corrosive nature of compromise (or lack thereof) between two people impeccably. Weeks later the film is still lingering, this is easily one of the most authentic and potent films on the subject since “Carnal Knowledge.”