Release Date: September 20th, 2013 (Limited and VOD)
Director: Bryan Fogel
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: 2/10
In May 2003, Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson starred in the comedic play they co-wrote – Jewtopia – premiering it in Los Angeles and then taking it to an off-Broadway production in late 2004 where it ran for over three years albeit with different actors playing the leads somewhere during the run. Whatever its magic was that kept it running that long is lost in the film adaptation, even though the screenplay was written by Fogel and Wolfson. The film also does not work despite a not untalented cast.
The film is about the friendship between Christian O’Connell and Adam Lipschitz, played as adults by Ivan Sergei and Joel David Moore, respectively. The plot is pretty straightforward. Adam is Jewish and Christian is not, but Christian wants to marry a Jewish girl because – due to one of many Jewish stereotypes the film utilizes – she will tell him what to do in every conceivable situation in his life and he will no longer have to make any decisions. He falls for a beautiful Jewish woman named Alison played by the lovely but relatively unfunny Jennifer Love Hewitt. Adam is engaged to his own “Jewish princess,” Hannah (Jamie-Lynn Sigler). Unfortunately, he is not ready to marry her and suffers what can only be called a nervous breakdown.
Christian enlists Adams help in pretending to be Jewish himself. For hilarity’s sake, he certainly goes to the extreme by introducing himself to Alison as a doctor when he is, in fact, a plumber. Much of the film’s attempt at humor comes from Christian’s deception and Adam’s almost Cyrano de Bergerac-style educating of Christian on how to act “Jewish.” The other attempt at humor centers on Adam’s unraveling the closer he gets to wedding Hannah.
Tossed into the mix are Christian’s father – a marine played by Peter Stormare in a wild performance – and his redneck brothers and Adam’s parents played in over-the-top performances by Rita Wilson and Jon Lovitz. Each of these actors have been better in better films, as have Sergei and Moore (see The Opposite of Sex for Sergei and either Avatar or his television stint on “Bones” for Moore).
In 90 minutes, Fogel and Wolfson toss numerous Jewish stereotypes in, one right after the other; there are so many, I know there are some I certainly did not catch. Numerous comedies have been built on racial and religious stereotypes and some of them have worked and some have not. Jewtopia falls into this latter category. It tries awfully hard to be funny, but it has to try too hard and that is never a good sign. There is only so much comedic mileage one can get out of a grown man going so far as to get circumcised to land the woman of his dreams, which he eventually does even when the truth comes out that he is, in fact, not Jewish at all. Maybe this is someone’s cup of tea, but it sadly was not mine.
