New angles on the Jewish perspective
Zach Braff had a lot of momentum when he sought financial backing for his new movie “Wish I Was Here.” His 2004 debut film, “Garden State” — which he directed and starred in — brought in $27 million at the box office and became a cult hit. Braff is known as an engaging onscreen presence from his longrunning TV comedy, “Scrubs.”
Yet from the beginning he was met with uniform rejection. The money people objected to the heavily Jewish theme of his movie, which is about three generations of a Jewish family in crisis, led by a patriarch, Mandy Patinkin, with such strong beliefs that he pays for his grandkids to attend a yeshiva.
“I couldn’t get it made because of the demands on me to tone down the Jewish part to appeal to a mass audience,” Braff says. “They wanted me to tone down the religious stuff, maybe take out the yeshiva scene and a scene of a prayer room where people daven,” sway as they pray.
Less marketable
“The implication was that the more Judaism was discussed or the more it was a part of the movie, the less marketable it will be,” says Braff, who got around what he feels was narrow-minded thinking by financing “Wish I Was Here” through Kickstarter, an online funding source for creative projects.
It opened in July, ending a fallow period for movies about the Jewish experience. His film isn’t the only new one.
This week “This IsWhere I Leave You,” based on Jonathan Tropper’s best-selling novel, opens with a cast including Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver and Jane Fonda. They belong to a family whose patriarch has just died. His final request is for his wife and adult children to sit shivah for him — a weeklong Jewish mourning tradition. There is an irony in all this because his widow (Fonda) isn’t Jewish, and his offspring are scarcely so themselves.
Tropper, who wrote the screenplay, believes his producers didn’t face Braff’s problem securing financing because “Where I Leave You” doesn’t specifically deal with a religious upbringing.
“My story is much more universal,” he says. “This is a family that doesn’t know they’re Jewish and never really spent time on it.”
He calls himself “lucky enough” so far to have escaped the need to sit shivah for a family member, but he has gone to friends’ homes to mourn their loved ones. Tropper says he had seen many movies about Jewish practices “where they got everything wrong.” He and director Shawn Levy, also Jewish, were determined to get their details right. For one, those are actual shivah chairs used in the movie, designed so mourners are low to the ground.
Romantic relationship
Yet another Jewish-themed film, “The Last 5 Years,” recently finished shooting. It is in the tradition of movies illuminating a romantic relationship between a Jew and a nonJew. Jeremy Jordan is the former, who falls for a temptress, a “shiksa goddess” played by Anna Kendrick. Based on an off-Broadway show, the movie
is almost entirely sung.
“The Last 5 Years” brings to mind Jewish themes in silent movies.
“It was very common to see a film about the Jewish boy who lives next door to an Irish girl, and they fall in love and have a child and live happily ever after,” says Eric Goldman, cinema professor at Yeshiva University in New York, who has put together a program for TCM this month on “The Jewish Experience in Film.”
Geared to immigrants
“They were geared to immigrants looking to assimilate,” he says. “If they could not, at least their child — the ultimate product — would.”
Films on that topic pretty much disappeared, only to emerge again in the 1970s with movies like “Annie Hall,” “TheWayWeWere” and “The Heartbreak Kid,” reflecting increased interfaith dating and marriage in America. In a famous scene from “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen partakes of a holiday meal with hisWASP girlfriend’s family, and the camera shows him dressed like an Orthodox Jew with payess (side curls) — the way he thinks he must look to them. “West Side Story” was originally written as a romance between a Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic girl to be called “East Side Story.” The principals were changed to make it more current.
The TCM series includes segments on the Holocaust, “Tackling Prejudice,” “The Jewish Homeland” and “Coming of Age.”
In the 1930s and ’40s, when most Hollywood studios were run by Jewish men, very few films about Jews were produced. Studio heads feared calling attention to themselves, especially with anti-Semitism rampant during those decades. It took a non-Jew, producer Darryl F. Zanuck, to make “Gentleman’s Agreement,” a seminal film about prejudice in the United States that plays Sept. 23 on TCM.
Goldman said there continues to be a controversy about the quality of “Gentleman’s Agreement,” in which Gregory Peck plays a reporter pretending to be Jewish to investigate anti-Semitism — even though it won the 1947 Oscar for best picture.
“I talked to (the film’s director) Elia Kazan, and he told me it was a very important film but not a great film,” Goldman says.
Overlooked classic
It shares a bill with “Crossfire,” a 1947 film about a murder motivated by anti-Semitism. Goldman considers it an overlooked noir classic.
“I think Jews and non-Jews will get a sense from ‘Crossfire’ of how minorities in this country felt prejudice,” he says.
Goldman looks to Jewish independent filmmakers to tell stories of Jewish life. But he is amply aware of barriers of the kind Braff faced.
“The reality is that studios are interested in one thing and one only,” he says. “That is to make not just money, but enough money.”