Keeping Up With The Steins

Yesterday afternoon I saw "Keeping Up With The Steins," the bar mitzvah comedy starring Jeremy Piven, playing the same character he plays in Entourage but with a different name, Doris Roberts, playing the same character she played in Everybody Loves Raymond but with fewer lines, Jami Gertz, playing not much of a character at all, Garry Marshall, and child actor Daryl Sabara. My grandma saw this movie a few weeks ago and didn't think very much of it.  "I couldn't tell," she said, "whether they were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, or whether they were trying to be serious."  And she was kind of right.  The movie didn't know what it wanted to be -- a farce about the excesses of bar mitzvahs, or a tug-at-the-heartstrings family comedy.   And so it floated in between, and ended up not terribly satisfying.  As a satire of the life of wealthy people in Hollywood, it wasn't particularly rich or pointed or fresh.  As a commentary on Bar Mitzvahs, it didn't say very much.  I didn't hate it.  I laughed a couple of times.  Daryl Sabara is a very likeable presence on screen.  Jeremy Piven was solid.  Doris Roberts was underutilized, and Jami Gertz, as the mother, was given nothing to do.  Cinemalogue has a review I agree with, pointing out the underdeveloped plots and the wasted opportunity to say something about religion.  Anything.  Anything at all.  I'm a tougher audience than most people for stuff like this -- I want things to have something to say.  I want comedy to have a point, at least a little bit -- or to get away with not having a point, I need it to be really funny.  This wasn't funny enough.  Not awful.  But certainly a disappointment.

Comments

[PG]

I think a movie about the intersection of socioeconomic WASPness -- the stature accessible to any American with enough education and money -- and Jewish identity would be interesting. What we think of as WASPness, the sweaters tied over one's shoulders, no longer has much to do with being Anglo Saxon or Protestant, though I think whiteness (if, like the Irish, Jews are now white*) still counts.
* http://tinyurl.com/my6wy