Keeping Up With the Steins Review
By David Kempler
You call that a bar mitzvah!?
Oy. It's heavy.
The Fiedlers, Joanne and Adam, played respectively by Jami Gertz and Jeremy Piven, are hellbent on outdoing their rivals, the Steins. The battlefield is the bar mitzvah scene in Brentwood, California. The Steins had a Titanic theme for their son's party. In response, Adam comes up with throwing his son's party at Dodger Stadium.
The first half of this film is filled with stereotypical Jewish jokes that bring back memories of the Borscht Belt in the Catskills, but only the negative ones. We've got the requisite interfering mother, Rose (Doris Roberts), the father, Irwin (Garry Marshall), who ran off many years earlier and who now returns as an elderly hippie with his young girlfriend (Darryl Hannah) in tow.
"Keeping up With the Steins" is narrated by the bar mitzvah boy, Benjamin (Daryl Sabara) as he goes from being embarrassed to scared, and eventually to being the pillar of the film.
In the second half of the show the director, Scott Marshall, switches gears from bad stereotypical humor to an overly schmaltzy chicken soup concoction designed to give us all the warm fuzzies. Gave me nausea and a severe case of yawning.
In the end we are told that we need to understand what is REALLY important in life is to be good and faithful. Smile and everything will turn out wonderfully. Sure it will. Yech.
