Review: “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah”
Please join us on Zoom this coming Thursday evening, August 14, for a discussion of “You Are So….” The access number is 918 583 7121 and the conversation will begin at 7:00 p.m. Central Time. Please note that you do not have to have seen the film in advance, but it is easily accessible on Amazon Prime. Below is a review which may help start the conversaton.
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Years ago, at the beginning of COVID, we created a film series called Blatt and Blue. This was a Synagogue project for our congregation in Tulsa, invented by me (?!) in an effort to become famous. Little did I know that it would confirm my obscurity. Sigh.
That aside, the series has endured. The principal reviewers are my wife, Alice Blue, and my friend, David Blatt, who have developed a pleasing rhythm of insightful commentary. Alice’s taste runs to Scandinavian procedurals under overcast skies in the eighties and nineties. The drearier the coastline, the happier it makes her. If the detective is traumatized, so much the better. We don’t often get that combination in Jewish films (like, never), but it’s the background aesthetic of everything she chooses. David’s choices are significantly more varied, but tend in the direction of Jew-y classics. That’s exactly as it should be for Blatt and Blue. The last thing he selected was the brilliant Shop on Main Street. In practical terms, the result between them is serious movies under (somewhat) overcast skies.
Every so often, I intervene. No one would call me a light-hearted film goer, but I am actually responsible for this month’s choice, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, by the protean and inventive Adam Sandler. Stacy and Lydia are best friends in Los Angeles, preparing for legendary bat mitzvah celebrations. One thing (boy touble) leads to another, and suddenly they are intergalactic warriors, bent on the destruction of each other’s happiness. Eventually there’s a predictable moment of crisis followed by a heartwarming, predictable resolution. It’s always sunny at a Los Angeles bat mitzvah.
I wish I could say that I’m a fan of this project. Sandler is clearly taken with the folkways of the Jews. Twice or three times he gives us four old Jewish ladies who fulfill all our expectations of battle-axe elders. They can’t offer much in the way of wisdom, but they deliver the goods on hard-edged affection, especially for angsty, unlovable teens. They have an earned world-weariness that rhymes nicely with adolescent agita.
Sandler also inhabits his role as Dad with an informal intimacy that many Jews will find familiar. It’s not exactly Dad-as-Friend, but it certainly isn’t authority or disciplinarian. He jokes about the shift from childhood to puberty and demonstrates impressive knowledge of pads and tampons. And he works hard to endear himself to his daughters’ friends. The one time he seems genuinely angry with Stacy, it is undone by the jokey bluster of his rant. This is a father who has checked out of the hierarchies of parenthood, the common default of metropolitan Jews.
Sandler also has a gift for a kind of softcore, inoffensive satire. The world of the Friedman Family is impossibly plush. No adult seems to have a job that stands in the way of Pilates, and their sectionals are upholstered in expensive neutrals. The bedrooms of the teenagers are cocoons of luxury, with poofy ottomans, skin rejuvenators, and enough blush to keep Sephora in business. Spa day comes to this world as often as lunch, although families seem rarely to eat together. In one scene, the Friedman mother (Idina Menzel) exercises restraint by buying her daughter a “temple-friendly” bat mitzvah dress. You think for a moment that here is sanity after all, but like Sandler’s rant, it is undone by indulgence. Ten minutes later, Stacy has the dress she really wanted, a skin-tight tube bought by her mother on the sly.
Sandler is similarly observant about the Jewish culture of his community. Real literacy is a dream, ground away by assimilation. Stacy prepares half-heartedly for her bat mitzvah, but no one makes real demands of her performance. With gentle good humor, Sandler walks us through the family synagogue, a pitch-perfect rendering of suburban Jewish life. It’s a low-impact world of jokey, infantile rabbis who have perfected a patter of faux-hip “engagement.” Everything here is least common denominator, including cookie-cutter bar/bat mitzvahs and their extravagant production values. The presiding genius is DJ Shmuly, a transplanted Israeli who alternatively snarls and whines. He is, perhaps, the most repellant figure of all.
Yet all of this seems pretty, pretty fine with Sandler. This is an exercise in observation, not a parsing of Jewish life. Sandler is too genial to go deep in this movie. It features his two daughters in starring roles, and you get the feeling that he is atoning for Uncut Gems, an agonizing sketch of jittery Jewish low-lifes. Doing two in a row would have been too much. If there is a moral awakening in this film, it is partial and imperfect. When Stacy publicly confesses her crimes against Lydia, she manages to take down most of the others in her class. Real moral refinement seems entirely out of reach.
But perhaps that is the truth about angsty teens. What is out of reach for Sandler is equally important: a punchier little film about the emptiness of Jewish lives, steeping in the luxury of Southern California.