The Great American Seder Movie

By now, it has become a familiar, stale routine, its annual appearance almost as dependable as the holidays themselves: the holiday-themed family film. Often starring Tim Allen, or a passel of indie stars looking for a big-budget payday, these films almost inevitably concern a squabbling family forcibly brought together for Christmas (or Thanksgiving or Easter), close quarters leading to tension, angry outbursts, open warfare, and eventually a tidy resolution to all difficulties. These films play a delicate double game, acknowledging the sour discontent at the heart of so many American families while also providing shots of hard-won familial harmony for those craving happy endings. "Home for the Holidays," "Christmas with the Kranks," "Surviving Christmas"-- these are just some of the recent films that seek entertainment in the mundane mingled pleasures and terrors of family togetherness.

 

Transposing the template of the Christmas film to a Jewish family's Passover seder, the new independent film "When Do We Eat?" is an attempt to make a holiday-friendly movie on the Christmas model for a Jewish audience. Director and co-writer Salvador Litvak takes every hoary Jew-cliché he can dig up and piles it into his messy, unwieldy, wildly uneven comedy.

 

The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink script bundles it all together: father Ira (Michael Lerner) is a rageaholic who runs a Christmas-ornament company; mother Peggy (Lesley Ann Warren) openly carries on an affair with her Israeli handyman; Grandpa (Jack Klugman) is an Old Country immigrant still despondent over the loss of his family in the Holocaust; daughter Nikki (Shiri Appleby) is an unconventional sex therapist; son Zeke (Ben Feldman) is a semi-recovering druggie; semi-estranged daughter Jennifer (Meredith Scott Lynn) is a bitter lesbian intent on blaming Ira for all her problems; youngest son Lionel (Adam Lamberg) is a borderline-autistic problem child; and worst of all for Ira, former favorite son Ethan (Max Greenfield), once a budding New Economy entrepreneur, is now an ultra-Orthodox wannabe.

 

Like its Christmas counterparts, "When Do We Eat?" mostly sticks to the script of a dysfunctional family brought together by holiday ritual. Unlike those films, its ritual is far more explicitly religious than most onscreen depictions of Christmas. Ira is world-renowned for running the world’s fastest Passover seder, and the bulk of "When Do We Eat?"takes place at that seder table, with the holiday’s rituals folded into every nook and cranny of the film’s dialogue and setting. The film expects a certain degree of familiarity with Jewish ritual for intelligibility; while it includes some Gentile and/or unaware characters to allow the uninitiated to be filled in, Litvak and Nina Davidovich’s script is sophisticated in its use of Jewish thought and practice as a running theme.

 

Which is not to say that "When Do We Eat?" is a sophisticated film. On the contrary, its other, less explicit influence--besides the Christmas films--is the oeuvre of gross-out kings, the Farrelly brothers. "When Do We Eat?"has a potty mouth and a dirty mind, crammed full of urine tests, druggings, semi-incestuous sexual flings, and cruel practical jokes. The film lets loose a constant barrage of off-color humor, as if to distract us from the religious business at hand.