If you believed the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This would have benefited from a healthy dose of mistaken identities, physical humor and other hallmarks of vintage slapstick, then Bad Shabbos is the film for you. Wait long enough, and one character is literally hit in the face with a pie.
But this is no flippant dismissal of Daniel Robbins’ irreverent new comedy centered on a Jewish man, his shiksa girlfriend, and his devout and disapproving mother. The director’s sophomore feature walks a delicate tightrope between the uncomfortable and the absurd, and it never sidesteps emotional vulnerability for the sake of genre expediency. Even at its most ridiculous points, it is not silly for its own sake but to emphasize and further reveal extant conflicts. As with the best comedy, Robbins lets the characters’ hurts, major and minor, seriously sting.
Bad Shabbos is set over a two-hour period during an eventful Shabbat dinner at the New York City apartment of Ellen and Richard (Kyra Sedgwick and David Paymer), whose son David (Jon Bass) is engaged to his recently converted girlfriend Meg (Meghan Leathers), to Ellen’s barely concealed chagrin. The dinner will mark the first meeting between David’s family and Meg’s Midwestern Catholic parents, John and Catherine (John Bedford Lloyd and Catherine Curtin). Along for the ride are Ellen and Richard’s other children: Abby (Milana Vayntrub), attending with her boyfriend Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman); and the youngest and most ne’er-do-well sibling, Adam, played by Theo Taplitz in a performance that evokes the smarm and arrogance of Jason Schwartzman’s early roles.
In crafting his ensemble of tightly wound characters, Robbins avoids the temptations of caricature in which even the finely wrought Nobody Wants This occasionally indulges. Sedgwick’s performance is a master class in bottled disapproval, as the subtle fluctuations in her facial expressions speak volumes. Paymer, the eternally sidelined nebbish, lands one of his most plum roles, as his character’s evangelical belief in the principles of nonviolent communication will be tested over the course of the movie. As Meg’s parents, Lloyd and Curtin compellingly portray outsiders willing to indulge in a night of good-faith communion with their Jewish in-laws but offer justifiable resistance when the gefilte fish, so to speak, just doesn’t smell right.
I’m not spoiling the matzo ball soup to reveal that the movie pivots on an unexpected death, which is mentioned in every description of the plot. I won’t add whose body becomes an inconvenient issue on the night of this ever-important meal, but as the clan of accomplices rallies to transport the corpse back to its home for a classic “New York death” — meaning the person won’t be found until their stench alarms the tenants in their neighboring apartments — the arrival of John and Catherine threatens to expose the crime and the cover-up.
This is where the movie’s secret weapon, the apartment building’s genial doorman Jordan (Method Man), enters the picture, positioning himself in the mode of Harvey Keitel’s Wolf in Pulp Fiction, and manifesting in the film’s most hilarious set piece. This is not an easy claim given the steady laugh ratio in the movie’s bonkers back half.
In some ways, Bad Shabbos is tailored to the New York Jewish audience whose presence is outsized in Palm Beach County. It is no surprise that the film has been a hit at Movies of Delray since its early December opening. (It’s expanding today, Feb. 7, to Movies of Lake Worth, Regal Royal Palm Beach, Paradigm Gateway in Fort Lauderdale and other theaters.) New York transplants to our area will appreciate the references to Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass, its extended riff on the pronunciation and translation of chutzpah, and its appropriation and subversion of Shabbat traditions.
But at its heart, Bad Shabbos is a movie for all or no faiths. It’s a paean to the increasingly endangered art of coming together, even if the reasons for this togetherness are not, well, kosher. In Daniel Robbins’ expansive, combustible combination of dysfunctional drama and loony comedy, a family is what you make it.
BAD SHABBOS. Director: Daniel Robbins; Cast: Jon Bass, Meghan Leathers, Kyra Sedgwick, David Paymer, Method Man, Milana Vayntrub, Catherine Curtin, John Bedford Lloyd; Distributor: Menemsha; Not rated
Now playing at Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, Regal Royal Palm Beach and other area theaters