At some point in the past few years, a screenwriter named Stuart Blumberg went to a meeting with Hollywood bigwigs and delivered a pitch that went something like this: “See, there’s this priest and this rabbi who want to bring religion to the people — yeah, I know, boooring — but see, they’re young, and they’re really cool, and they’re best friends, and they use all sorts of New Age techniques to get people to church and to synagogue. Anyway, here’s the deal: They both fall in love with the same woman! It’s hilarious, see, because one of them is a priest — a Catholic priest, get it, in love with a girl? And now get this: The girl isn’t Jewish, so it’s a big problem for the rabbi too!”
Forget the fact that the script in question, which has been made into a new movie called Keeping the Faith, is an exceptionally witless comedy with no jokes — except, that is, when people fall down. The priest falls down trying to read big old books. A horrible Jewish-American princess falls down when the rabbi punches her in the stomach (don’t ask why) and later falls down into a New York gutter when she grabs at his taxicab door as he makes a break from her voracious come-on. (The priest also sets himself on fire swinging incense and has to put himself out by sitting in the holy-water font, which is kind of like falling down.)
Forget that the dialogue is almost unbearably cute: When playing basketball, the rabbi and the priest injure themselves. “Oy,” says the rabbi, and the priest responds: “Amen to your oy.”
Forget that the direction, by the talented young actor Edward Norton, is remarkably amateurish and that the performances in the two leading roles, by Norton as the priest and Ben Stiller as the rabbi, are surprisingly lacking in grace, charm, and lightness of spirit.
Forget, in other words, that Keeping the Faith is terrible and that you shouldn’t see it unless you want to feast in the undeniable visual glories of the Amazonian TV actress Jenna Elfman, who plays the love interest.
Forget all this and journey back in time to the meeting where Stuart Blumberg sold his script to the folks at Spyglass Entertainment. These people are in the movie business to make money. Aside from the fact that the script is wretched, what on earth could have convinced them that Keeping the Faith was a sensible commercial idea?
It’s not necessary to be a faithful Catholic, or a Catholic at all, to understand that Catholics make up the largest religious denomination in America — and that a good many of them might object to seeing a priest in full liplock with a beautiful blonde. There’s nothing necessarily offensive about a cinematic portrayal of a priest who undergoes a crisis of faith — but the movie doesn’t resolve that crisis of faith in any way. Its makers do not show the slightest understanding of priestly vows, except that priests are not allowed to have sex, which is probably the worst possible thing a Hollywood executive could imagine aside from getting a bad table at Morton’s or the Ivy.
Nor is it necessary to be a synagogue-going Jew to understand that the notion of a Conservative rabbi engaging in wild premarital sex with a Gentile might make a lot of people uneasy.
Actually, Americans who don’t attend church or synagogue may well find Keeping the Faith just as disturbing as traditional Catholics and Jews will. Such people generally don’t like to confront religion in any guise. And the confusion and cowardice on display in Keeping the Faith can only make its audience feel ill at ease.
It’s bad enough for a Jew to sit through the movie’s low point — a Yom Kippur sermon in which the rabbi asks forgiveness from his congregation because he didn’t tell all of them he was sleeping with a shiksa.
But what are people ignorant of the ways of Judaism supposed to make of such a scene? And how are they supposed to react to the scene a few minutes later when our hero is rewarded with the head rabbi position at his synagogue?
The truth is that Norton, Blumberg, and the people who made Keeping the Faith don’t know what to make of their own supposedly comic love triangle. They have borrowed the opening lines of a dirty joke and concocted a mild and confusing sitcom out of them. But sitcoms only work when they’re familiar and made with panache and command. Keeping the Faith would have been better told as a dirty joke, instead of just a dirty trick played on an unsuspecting public.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the New York Post.
