I will admit that I went to this movie because I thought the trailer was ridiculous and terrible. Jesse Eisenberg, the lead actor, looks like he's wearing a terrible wig (though after watching the film, I do think it's his real hair) and the story looked silly and over-earnest. I was basically not wrong at all. This is a ridiculous movie that tries too hard to make me give a crap about an utterly boring story.
Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a Hasidic kid in his late teens/early twenties living in his parents' house in Brooklyn in the late 1990s (I think it takes place in Williamsburg, though it's never really clear - which is one of the many problems with the film. I guess it could be Crown Heights, but I don't think so). Sam is rather bored with his life and looking ahead to marrying the neighborhood hottie (who he, of course, can't speak to because, well, they're Orthodox and all) and ultimately becoming a rabbi or taking over his father's fabric store on the Lower East Side.
His best friend and next door neighbor is Leon, a super gooddie-two-shoes who is the star of the rabinical class they take together. Leon's brother Yosef is a misfit and soon recruits Sam into his business of smuggling extasy from Amsterdam into the the U.S.
At some point Sam is making more money than he knows what to do with, has lost the chance of a good marriage, has been kicked out of the house by his family and has become much more successful at drug running than he ever would have been, had he gone down a good path.
I guess the tension throughout the film is based around the split between Sam's Orthodox religion and the free, modernness of his life style - including pushing drugs that specifically lead to sexual liberation. The problem I had with this dichotomy is that Sam never comes across as all that serious a Hasid in the first place. He does not want to become a rabbi - that's what his parents want him to do - he wants to work for his father in the secular world. He screws around in his Yeshiva class. He's smart and knows talmudic stuff, because he's a smart guy, but he's never really seems like a true believer.
What you get, then, is a guy who is basically just going into an illegal business - and doing well at it. So what? Why is that interesting to watch? I never really saw that he was all that regretful that he was doing what he was doing. He was much more interested in the new crazy lifestyle he was leading and the new access he had to sex and women.
It really seems that he is only incidentally Hasidic - that that is not really a relevant part of his character. Before he gets involved in the drugs, he does the things he supposed to do and says the things he's supposed to say, but we never really get a view of why that the Hasidic lifestyle is bad or good - or anything. That he is Hasidic is almost a punch-line it's so irrelevant to the events of the story.
Some details don't make much sense to me - and really hurt my connection to the story. For reasons that I couldn't figure out, Sam's family only speak in perfect English to one another. I can say from living near Hasids for awhile in Brooklyn that most that I see on the subway speak Yiddish to one another or some other Eastern European language. When they speak English, it is with a pretty thick accent (as English is their second or third language). That Sam's family at the dinner table sounds exactly like my family at the dinner table is weird.
And then there's the hair. I am sure that Jesse Eisenberg's payas were his own and not clip-on, but they are terrible. I guess this happens with curly-haired Jews (I'm sure I would have bad payas too), but these really looked like a joke. Also - is Jesse unable to grow facial hair? At what point to hassids start growning beards? Jesse remained baby-faced through the whole thing which felt weird even if it isn't.
The film is slow and dull throughout with a very predictible and uninteresting storyline. At no point was I interested in an emotional level to the story or worried that one thing or another would happen to Sam. On top of everything the execution of the film is sloppy. Director Kevin Asch and writer Antonio Macia really do a bad job with this one. It's not even fun to watch and laugh a the hair-dos. I't just boring.
Stars: 1 of 4
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