‘Bad Shabbos,’ good guffaws
Don’t you hate it when it’s Friday night, you’re meeting the soon-to-be machatunim, and there’s a dead body in the bathroom?
“Bad Shabbos” is one of the funniest, laugh-out-loud-est films since Mel Brooks picked up a camera. Period.
If you don’t believe me, trust the folks who showed up at screenings at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. They gave it the Audience Award, a prize based on the votes of attendees at every performance of every one of the 100-plus films accepted into the competition.
At its simplest, “Bad Shabbos” is an old-fashioned farce. But it’s not all guffaws. There is a serious, at times dark side to the comedy, which elevates the film far above sitcom level.
David (Jon Bass) and his Catholic fiancée Meg (Megan Leathers) are about to have their parents meet for the first time over Shabbat dinner. Meg’s parents are flying in from Wisconsin, and tension is high because, well, they are Catholic and flying in from Wisconsin.
David begs his family to behave. “These people are not used to families arguing,” he tells his mom, Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), prompting his dad, Richard (David Paymer), to wonder, “What are they, Mormons?”
But David’s concern is legitimate. Ellen has been far from accepting of her future daughter-in-law, though Meg’s done everything possible to curry favor — including attending conversion classes.
Adding to the tension, David’s sister, Abby (Milana Vayntrub), will be at dinner with her obnoxious boyfriend Benjamin (Ashley Zuckerman), who cheats on her and is mean to younger brother Adam (Theo Taplitz).
Because of his constant needling, Adam dissolves laxatives in Benjamin’s drink — not knowing he suffers from colitis. Without going into detail, Benjamin trips in the bathroom, hits his head on a cabinet, and dies. Ironically, that sets off nonstop hilarity as the family tries to figure out a way to get the body out of the house before the arrival of the soon-to-be machatunim. That requires assistance from the friendly doorman (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), who not only helps dispose of the body but substitutes for Benjamin as Abby’s boyfriend when the family sits down for dinner.
It is funnier on the screen than it is in summary.
In a Zoom interview, I asked director and co-screenwriter Daniel Robbins where the idea came from. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “It was from Adam [Mitchell], the producer, and Zack [Weiner], the co-writer.
“Zack’s family holds these very lively Shabbat dinners on the Upper West Side, and his mom has a lot of guests over. Sometimes she might pull a prank to keep things fun and light. And [Adam] heard about this and wondered what would happen if one of these pranks ended up with someone dying.
“Then Zack said that could be pretty funny. So we outlined the story, and it just kept growing from there.”
Truth be told, I was bothered by efforts to get Adam off, to escape any punishment for his “prank.” (That apparently differentiated me from the Tribeca crowd.)
So I asked Daniel if anyone had raised concerns about that during filming. “There was a conversation, where we thought maybe Benjamin should come back to life at the end. But ultimately, we decided it was funnier, and the movie worked better as is.
“If you’re in territory that’s too safe, you kind of lose your edge, and it becomes less funny. So we tried to be right on the line of what’s okay. For some people, it’s going to be too far. But for the overwhelming majority of people, it’s funny.”
Still, Robbins was a bit “nervous about how it would be received. Something like this, so specifically Jewish, it would cause controversy.”
In fact, there is a plot line about younger brother Adam being fanatical about joining the IDF. “After October 7, I knew having the IDF in the conversation was more inflammatory than it was beforehand. People suggested that we change the movie or adjust the cut.”
But, as with the cause of death, “we left the movie pretty much what it was.”
This is Robbins’ third film. The first was a horror movie, “The Pledge.” He followed that with “Citizen Weiner,” a mocumentary following co-writer Zack Weiner’s runs for New York City Council — until he was barred when a sex tape was released.
He has two projects on the back burner. The first is a Chanukah movie, “because I don’t feel there’s a great Chanukah holiday movie yet. And then another, a comedy about chess boxing.”
Yup, I asked about that, and it is apparently a thing. “It’s a real sport that people will soon learn about. You do two minutes of chess followed by two minutes of boxing until someone wins by knockout or checkmate. It’s a modern biathlon.
Robbins, 33, grew up in Westchester and went first to the Westchester Day School and then to Ramaz on the Upper East Side. It’s where his film career began, because, he said modestly, “I was one of the funnier kids in the grade.”
What was supposed to be a 15-minute riff about a class retreat became a 40-minute video that “really lit a spark.”
“Bad Shabbos,” the flame that spark lit, opened May 30 at the Teaneck Cinema, will be screened at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee on June 5, and opens June 6 at the Montgomery Cinema in Skillman.
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