“HAVE YOU SEEN Keeping Up With the Steins?” asked my friend, a sophisticated and well-to-do New Yorker with high-toned literary tastes, of a new movie about a 13-year-old boy and his family preparing for his bar mitzvah in Los Angeles. “I loved it. I just loved it.”
So I went. And I was flabbergasted. Keeping Up With the Steins is among the most amateurish movies ever to receive a theatrical release. The cinematography is frequently blurry, the camera is never in the right place, scenes are so haphazardly assembled that, at times, it feels like the projectionist mixed up the order of the reels, and the whole thing was so cheaply and incompetently made that the supposedly over-the-top $500,000 bar mitzvah in the movie’s opening scene resembles a theatrical production at a summer camp.
What could have possessed my friend to speak so enthusiastically about it? For that matter, what possessed otherwise sensible critics like Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News and Ronnie Scheib of Variety to write glowingly about it?
I think they were all grading on a curve. Whatever severe shortcomings Keeping Up With the Steins possesses, it still features yarmulkes, 23 words of Yiddish, some people being lifted on chairs, a hora, a brisket, a rabbi with some wise things to say, a loving grandfather telling his grandson that Judaism is about more than bagels and lox, and a grandmother who says, “Shah, darling.”
So what if the grandparents seem to have stepped out of a time warp and sound not like the grandparents of a 13-year-old in 2006 but like the grandparents of a 13-year-old in 1976? What Jew, especially one who doesn’t actually speak Yiddish, could resist such a bounty of shleps and nachas and fershluggeners?
It seems that when your ethnic group is being gently teased and happily celebrated on screen, all critical faculties go out the window, even if the ethnic humor is painted with such a broad brush that it turns everything into a cartoon. Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the surprise mammoth hit from 2002 that inspired it, Keeping Up With the Steins only wants to make its constituents happy.
It’s the broad strokes that make ethnic comedies like this so appealing to audiences. “Look,” a movie like this says. “Look how harmless and lovable we are.” The only failing of the Greek family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding is that it’s so full of love it can be overwhelming. The only failing of the Jewish family in Keeping Up With the Steins is–well, actually, there are no failings. Even the battle promised by the movie’s title–a battle of gaudy bar mitzvahs–fails to materialize when our hero’s loving dad agrees to cancel the big party at Dodger Stadium that was going to compete with the Stein bar mitzvah aboard the U.S.S. Cunard.
Ethnicity becomes a form of comfort food in movies like these. It’s not a powerful and primal force, a link to generations unknown and an ancient heritage, a defining burden. It’s more a kind of style, a nice and cozy accessory, like a handsome alpaca sweater on a cold day. Only once in Keeping Up With the Steins is there even a hint that Judaism is an actual religion: when the rabbi (played with the right touch of oleaginous self-regard by Richard Benjamin) tells the bar mitzvah boy that his sins will soon belong to him and not be the responsibility of his parents. But there’s not even a hint of a whisper of what that might actually mean for the boy’s life.
They may bring pleasure, these toothless ethnic comedies, but they are meaningless. That can’t be said about the movies made by the man who is now without question the biggest ethnic star in America–someone of whom you have, in all likelihood, never heard. His name is Tyler Perry, and he is a writer, director, and cross-dressing actor who spent more than a decade writing and starring in plays about black families that toured the country, playing for a week at a time in big theaters, and marketed exclusively to African Americans.
Perry astounded Hollywood when his first two movies, Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion, grossed $22 million and $30 million respectively in their opening weeks. These, too, are very amateurish, very broad films in which women move their necks around and say “ummm hmmm” while men slap-five with each other, roll their eyes, and dance around.
But they are much more than that. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the title character is forced to cope with the irresponsibility of the men in her life, while Madea in Madea’s Family Reunion is raising a foster child whose mother is a crackhead. There are wild shifts in mood between overdone comedy and very harsh observations about the black community’s profound wounds.
Perry has become a cultural hero for African Americans because he does not shy away from the uglier aspects of the lives in the world he is teasing and celebrating. Maybe the reason a movie like Keeping Up With the Steins has nothing to say is that many American Jews seem to think the greatest problem facing them today is choosing a theme for their son’s bar mitzvah.
John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic and author of Can She Be Stopped?
