Opening
in Arizona
today:
Menashe—Yiddish movies used to be a thing; more than a hundred
of them were made, mostly in Poland or the U.S., in the decades before the
Second World War. After that, they became rarities—this indie drama is thought
to be the first American feature made mostly in Yiddish since 1975’s drama
Hester Street.
The title character is a Hasidic widower in his thirties who works in a
grocery store in Brooklyn. He’s a genuinely
loving father to his ten-year-old son Rieven, and doesn’t agree with the
requirement that the boy go to live with his uncle and aunt until Menashe
remarries, because of the belief that a child must not be raised by a single
parent. He’s in no hurry to remarry, but he wants his kid back.
The simple story that ensues provides director and co-writer Joshua Z.
Weinstein ample opportunity for a peek into a little-understood world. The
movie was shot, not quite surreptitiously but with a very low profile, in the
Hasidic enclave in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with
a cast of non-actors. While this generates a neo-realist, almost
verité
atmosphere,
Menashe
transcends cultural anthropology. It’s a character study, brought to life by a
gifted first-time star—Menashe Lustig, on whose life the story was loosely
based.
Menashe is described as a
schlimazel by his
own family members, ungenerously but perhaps not inaccurately—he’s a nice
fellow, but he’s chronically late, late with the rent, broke, and so forth. He
insists on mild rebellion from his culture—not wearing the full Hasidic regalia
on the street, for instance—in ways that nettle his family and do him no
favors.
As played by Lustig, however, the character is also quietly,
unsentimentally, even a little exasperatingly endearing. Lustig gives us a
naturalistic portrait of the man’s humor, his guilt, his anger, his
mischievousness. At one point Menashe’s disapproving brother-in-law says he’d
like to see him become a
mensch, but we in
the audience see him this way already.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard—Samuel L. Jackson is the Hitman, Darius
Kincaid, who specializes in killing rich, powerful scumbags; Ryan Reynolds is
the Bodyguard, Michael Bryce, who escorts such scumbags to safety. Michael is
recruited to get Darius, his longtime enemy, safely from prison
in Manchester, England to The Hague, so that he can testify at the
International Court of Justice against a brutal Belarusian dictator (Gary
Oldman, who else?).
Apparently the imprisoned tyrant is pretty well-connected, as massive numbers
of mercenaries try to kill Darius enroute. Hitman and Bodyguard bicker
jocularly through mayhem, slaughter, even torture. Michael
is persnickety, orderly, a planner, while Kincaid flies by the seat
of his pants.
There's nothing new here, but strictly on its own terms, this
cartoonishly overscaled buddy picture, directed by the Australian
Patrick Hughes, is perfectly executed. Well, almost perfectly; it has
the genre's annoying sentimental streak. And like most
big-budget action flicks of the last few decades, it could be trimmed by
at least ten minutes without losing anything it needs, but as it clocks in at
just under two hours it doesn't quite wear out its welcome.
Yet despite the skill with which it's made, there is an imbalance to
The
Hitman's Bodyguard, in the unsavory contrast between the cutesy comedy
and the shocking violence. When the dictator kills a man's family while he
watches, and then minutes later we're back with Reynolds and Jackson and
expected to crack up at their bantering, it's really jarring, and it doesn't
feel like a deliberate black-comedy effect. It just feels like
an adolescent sensibility, willing to use the sufferings of people under
such regimes as a summer blockbuster plot point.
The leads keep us diverted from this ugliness, however. Reynolds has
never been a favorite of mine, but he 's a good sport here,
embracing the role of a prim foil to Jackson. That great actor has rarely gotten
the chance to cut loose to quite the degree he does here. He seems to have a
blast, singing fatalistic blues lyrics (there's a pretty good one written
by Jackson himself, and reprised under the end credits) and cheerfully guffawing
at the twists of fate that fling him about. Darius is out of his cell, so
despite the carnage around him and the constant peril, anything else is gravy.
