Directed by Boaz Yakin
To name a child after someone who’s still living is to wish the latter death. That’s the Jewish tradition. Boaz Yakin seems to have missed that in his research for some reason.
It may seem like a nit-pick, but it’s important. There is a scene in a car where the protagonist, Sonia(Renée Zellweger) and her husband are taking their son to his briss and he announces that the child is to be named after The Rebbe(John Randolph), and not after her dead brother Yossie(Shelton Dane). This slight on her feelings begins her alienation from Chassidic Judaism.
The movie is about the conflict between not only Judaism, but God, and Sonia. The baby has to be forced from her hands to be circumcised. The symbolism hits you over the head like a two-by-four.
Yakin and his wife and sister(I think) try in their screenplay to add a dash of magic realism to the movie. At the very beginning of the film, Yossie tells a young Sonia(Jackie Ryan) about an ancestor who was impregnated by a demon and walks the earth forever because the Lord wouldn’t have her and Satan didn’t think she belonged among the damned. Yossi’s ghost shows up every now and then and so does the ancestor(Kathleen Chalfant). It’s God vs. Lilith[Adam’s first wife, and a big demon in Jewish mythology] and it’s made quite clear that God is the bad guy.
While the cosmic stuff goes on in the background, Sonia has problems of a more earthy nature. Her brother in law Sender(Christopher Eccleston) offers her a off-the-books job as a buyer for his jewelry business (He also screws her[the phrase ‘making love’ just isn’t appropriate here]), which liberates her and causes her husband Mendel(Glenn Fitzgerald) to complain about being neglected.
Here too, it’s God who’s the villain. When they make love at night for the first time in their new apartment, Mendel worries that his carnal thoughts are sinful and stops, leaving Sonia unsatisfied and depressed. She goes to the Rebbe trying to get help, but her description enflames his long-dead passion for his wife(Kim Hunter) , and he dies.
The disintegration of Sonia and Mendel’s marriage is aided and abetted by a legalistic and misogynist Jewish faith (the marriage counselor begins the session by asking ‘do you pray?’ thus sending poor Sonia out the door). A completely chaste relationship with a talented young sculptor(Allen Payne) who’s work she’s trying to sell is misconstrued by the evil Sender as adultery, and gets her kicked out of her house and disowned by her entire family without her even being permitted to defend herself.
That doesn’t ring true either.
Granted there’s lots of hypocrisy in the Chassidic community(as there is everywhere else in the known universe) and this is a fascinating movie, no doubt about it.
But while Sonia and her dead brother are full blooded characters, her husband and his relations are not. They are stick figures that can be blown down with the slightest of breezes.
Let’s be grateful that Yakin’s Jewish. Otherwise the Jewish community would call him antisemitic.
They’re going to be on him like a ton of bricks anyway.
