Movie Review: Oy Vey! Keeping Up with the Steins Is Anything But a Mitzvah
Keeping up with the Joneses is one thing, but as Adam Fiedler and his family find out, keeping up with the Steins can be a real pain in the ass, and the wallet. For audiences, Keeping Up with the Steins is just a pain.
The feature debut of Rob Marshall begins as a clever, light-hearted film that satirizes the obsessive and maniacal lengths to which Jewish families (especially in Hollywood, it appears) will go to honor and celebrate 13-year old children and their rites of passage into adulthood. Hollywood agent Adam Fiedler (Jeremy Piven doing a watered-down version of his character in Entourage) seethes in his chair at the bar mitzvah of his competitor's (Larry Miller, revisiting a character strikingly similar to the one he played in Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman) son, knowing he is now obligated to outdo the celebration thrown for the young Zachary Stein. But how do you one-up a replica of the Titanic? How about a bar mitzvah at Dodger Stadium?
Fiedler obsesses about how he and his sweet wife (Jami Gertz) can trump Stein's event and decide they need reinforcements, so they bring in the Stein's absurd party planner (think Franck from Father of the Bride, without the laughs. yea, you read that right) to help mastermind the proceedings. Sadly, instead of following the acerbic thread he began in the first few sequences, Marshall decides to play nice and turns the film into a story about a man trying to reconcile being abandoned by his own father with his desire to be the perfect dad for his kid. Fiedler's dad Irwin, played by the director's own father, Garry Marshall, returns, hippie lover in tow, for his grandson's bar mitzvah and attempts to support his grandson in a way he never could his own child. Moves at reconciliation with his son are rebuked even as the grandson-grandfather bond is strengthened, and the sap flows like manischewitz. Think The Parent Trap meets a circumcised wooden bat to the skull.
The movie quickly devolves into an after-school special, with maybe the worst cinematic device imaginable being employed throughout: the voiceover narration of a pre-teen. Yikes. Note to directors, it's probably safe to assume that there are very few, if any, young actors who can pull off a dramatic and comedic narration of an entire film. And the young actor in question, Daryl Sabara, never even has a chance considering the hackneyed script with which he was forced to work.
We got the feeling we were watching a made-for-tv movie at summer camp, dying a slow death in the bleachers while we prayed for the film to end so we could go back to our cabins and floss our teeth. None of the characters are fleshed out beyond miserable stereotypes and the lame jokes fall apart like dry matzoh in almost every scene.
It is too bad Marshall felt the need to make a warm and fuzzy movie using a theme that is ripe for comedic dissection. As our friend, a twenty-something Jewish lady, stated: "My mother would love this movie." She did not mean that as a ringing endorsement. With that said, we desperately hope this movie is marketed to pre-teen Jewish kids and their mothers and grandparents, because if you do not fit in the previously mentioned demographic, this move will beat you senseless.
Keeping Up with the Steins opens today in Austin.
*Image (c) Miramax*
