15 | ★★★★✩
The up-state New York Jewish world in which director Nathan Silver’s ninth feature film is set is either comfortingly nostalgic or, in its depiction of the Jewish condition, annoyingly oblivious to 21st century concerns in the way it seems only American Jews (bless their sheltered little hearts) are capable of.
Potentially more annoying still is that the comedy is based on the kind of Jew that gentiles have long liked most: the ineffectual, hapless, self-pitying, physically incompetent and above all unthreatening Jew. So if you are both Jewish and trope-phobic (as I am) you might be forgiven for taking a slightly jaded perspective of any widespread critical acclaim. For here is the archetypal Jew that the world can only hate if it is, to use the comedy definition of the prejudice, more antisemitic than absolutely necessary.
These are the thoughts that dominate during the opening sequences of Silver’s pleasingly unpolished film. His hero is Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) who is the living breathing embodiment of nebbishness. He lives at home with his doting mother. He is a cantor at the local synagogue but he has lost his voice. Brimful of self-loathing he attempts suicide by lying in the path with his tallit still around his shoulders and his kippah over his face. When the truck stops Ben waves him on with instructions to “keep going.”
It is here at last that Ben’s loathing for himself almost matches my loathing for him, and where Silver’s films becomes more interesting. So does Ben as we see that there is thankfully one remaining functional side to his life, tutoring 12-year-olds in a b’nai mitzvah class.
His recent past explains a lot. A year or more ago his wife, an alcoholic writer, died after slipping on ice and hitting her head. Shot with natural light and on a grainy16mm camera the film is caught up in the slow current of Ben’s drifting gfief until Carla (Carole Kane) steps into his life by picking him up off the floor of a bar where he was not unreasonably punched for being annoying.
Carla turns out to be his former music teacher. Her Irish surname was her late husband’s and Carla, née Kessler, is not only Jewish but wants to be bat bitzvahed and tutored by Ben.
The blossoming of this friendship takes place against the background of Ben’s life at home and synagogue where the discussion is how early is too early when introducing children to the Holocaust, a dilemma that is given focus by the bingo fundraiser for the restoration of Holocaust Torah scrolls.
Everything becomes a little bit excruciating, but in the best possible way. Sure, the attractive Protestant who uses J-Date because she doesn’t like the feel of foreskins seems like a case of not only Silver saying his fantasy out loud, but writing it down and paying people to act it out. Yet between Ben’s soul-mate Carla and his tryst with the rabbi’s daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) a very Jewish outlook emerges here, one that makes a plea to live life to the full. Jews everywhere can be down with that.
