SFJFF: The Talent Given Us

How typical of a family is it? There's the dad, Al, a gruff bear of a man beaten down by illness and the henpecking of his wife. There's Emily, the BuJew sister, and, of course, the hyper critical and a bit hysterical yet totally loving Jewish mother. How Jewish is it? The reason why they find themselves travelling across country in a mini-van is because the mother gets so frustrated that the son never calls that she decides to take everyone in the family to go visit him. There's recurring jokes about therapy (at one point, Emily, the flaky actress trying to make it in LA, puts her mother on the couch and plays psychoanalyst) and lots of jokes surrounding the daughter's inability to find a husband. As the head of the Jewish Film Festival said before the movie and while announcing the swell after-movie party at the Lucky 13, "you'll probably need a drink after watching this movie."

So the family travels across country and does the standard issue road trip bonding. Except with the twists you'd figure you'd get in this kind of family dynamic. Like Emily trying to teach her mother yoga and meditation or detailing her not quite vanilla sex life. We also get the usual assortment of road trip cliches happening: truths are revealed, bonds are made, and self-actualization happens. There's even the introduction of the outside character that shakes things up within the family thing. That outside character is, of course, a shiksa.

The amazing thing about the movie is that it's so convincingly true-to-life and natural that the movie feels like it's improvised. Or a reality show. But it's not. While his sisters, Emily and Maggie, are actresses in real life, the parents aren't. Yet you'd never know it because of the naturalness of their performance. The father, Al, in particular, is a completely memorable character-- stiffly moving around to an undisclosed illness and constantly chewing on a straw, you're barely able to understood what he says throughout the movie yet you still can feel the underlying strength and pride lying inside him. And he and Judy come off as pretty much like every elderly couple who've been married for so long. Which, of course, is what they are.

All of this adds an interesting twist to all this. Everyone "plays" characters yet they're also kind of playing themselves. Or not. It's hard to tell and all of it is a little vouyeristic. Either Andrew and the rest of his family are braver than any family we've ever seen (Emily, in particular, is totally hilarious in playing up her cartoonish flakiness) or his family are great actors. And even though Andrew isn't in the movie that much, he's the bravest one in the movie as he goes to a place probably no director has every had to go, not Spielberg, not Hitchcock, not even Brett Ratner-- he actually filmed a sex scene between his parents.

Of course, all of this would be one big in-joke about his family and families (read Jewish) like them, but in capturing the humanity of his family, he manages to capture the humanity in all of our families. We're sure some family in Botswana will see this movie and think that parts of it are about themselves. At the end, this movie is nothing but one big huge valentine to his parents and it's that sweet center at the middle that would make anyone be into it.