LOS ANGELES—When I met Nina Davidovich and Salvador Litvak, the creators of a new film, When Do We Eat?, the first thing I asked them was, “WHAT were you thinking?”  I didn’t ask it in quite that way, but my intention was clear.  I was not amused by their over-the-top comedy.  In fact, I was offended by it.

 

When Do We Eat? is a family-home-for-the-holidays film.  In this case, however, the family is Jewish and the holiday is Passover.  Davidovich and Litvak contend that they mean to point out the universality of all dysfunctional families and how a shared spiritual experience can overcome all obstacles and lead to understanding and love.  I don’t think so.  At least, not in this case, where the family is not only not loving, but also not lovable.  What’s more, they represent every hypocrisy an ignorant anti-Semite might attribute to a Jewish family.

 

Let’s start with the father, Ira Stuckman, an angry bully played with apoplectic fury by Michael Lerner.  He begins by attempting to rush through the Passover Seder, skipping pages of ceremony, to placate the  impatient members of the family, who are only there to eat.  Among them are his five children, including Ethan (Max Greenfield), a new convert to Chasidism, who appears to have chosen this lifestyle in order to avoid having to take over his father’s Christmas ornament business.  His new religiosity doesn’t stop him from sexually succumbing to his attractive cousin before dinner, however.

 

Then there is the daughter, Nikki (Shiri Appleby), who has channeled her nymphomania into a successful practice as a “sex therapist.”  The next son, Zeke (Ben Feldman), is a drugee who laces Ira’s drink with an Ecstasy tablet, making his father hallucinatory throughout the Seder. 

 

The youngest son, Lionel (Adam Lamberg), is supposedly autistic; he spends the evening grunting and screaming in an unfunny performance that would have to give every parent of an autistic child a huge pain in the heart.  In the end, it turns out that he has been faking his autism all these years because his affliction has served to bring the family together in common cause and shared burden.  Is this supposed to give hope and solace to the parents of autistic children?

 

Jack Klugman, he of  The Odd Couple, also has a seat at the Seder table.   Dragging a packed suitcase wherever he goes in order to be ready for the next Holocaust, Klugman plays the sour, nasty grandfather who by his behavior exposes how his son, Ira, got to be such an angry bully.

 

And finally, there is Jennifer (Meredith Scott Lynn), Ira’s daughter from an earlier marriage.  She is gay and brings her African-American partner (Cynda Williams) to the Seder, giving the family a foil to whom they can explain, sporadically and insufficiently, what the Seder is all about.  Unfortunately, I think that anyone who has never been to a Seder would not be terribly enlightened after having attended this one.

 

The only sympathetic character in this unhappy comedy is the mother, Peggy, played by Lesley Ann Warren.  She is, by turns, conciliatory, helpless, frustrated, disappointed, and terribly terribly sad.  Warren, whom I interviewed at a reporters’ round table at the Regency Beverly Wilshire Hotel a few days later, said she was intrigued by the part and the dynamics of the family.  “The situation is extreme, but the family isn’t,” she said.  “They have all these factions that are not specific to just Jewish families.”

 

She also acknowledged that she is not offered parts as a Jewish woman, even though she is one, because she is not the stereotypical image that most people have in mind.  She is attractive, thin, and what’s more, “This is actually my own nose,” she said with a grin.

 

She sees Peggy as an observer rather than an active participant.  Very different from her own persona, she admits.  “I’m someone who tries to keep all the plates in the air, to make sure everyone is okay.  It’s an impossible job,” she says. “It can’t be done.”

 

Salvador Litvak, who co-wrote this film with his wife, and also directed it, says he used the Haggadah, the traditional story of Passover and the Jews’ flight from Egypt, as his outline.  “We wanted to make people laugh,” he said, “but also to show that they can heal.”  In the film, the destructive behavior of the Stuckman family is equivalent to the behavior of the Pharaoh, he said, and the historic flight to freedom is meant to reassure each member of the family that he can “liberate himself and be the person he was meant to be.”

 

Litvak, who calls himself a “Jewtino”, was born in Chile and came to America when he was five years old.  An English major at Harvard, he went on to law school, which he says taught him “the precise use of language,” and then to UCLA film school.  He believes that “you can only talk about deep things through comedy.”  And, “Our Jewish culture,” he says, “has sophisticated ways of healing.”

 

He also made reference to the “13 attributes of God,” which are celebrated at Yom Kippur, and noted that each one of his characters in the film “is missing at least one attribute, but by the end of the film each has made some progress.”

 

Litvak, who has been previewing the film at theaters all over the country, as well as at various festivals, admits that the film has “gotten some flak from the Jewish community,” and that “about 10% of the audience hated it.”  He has received kudos from a few rabbis, however, including a Chasidic one, he says.  To check out this claim, I spoke to Rabbi Shlomo “Schwartzie” Schwartz, who has a cameo as Moses in the film.

 

“I thought the film was hilarious,” Rabbi Schwartz said.  “I’ve already seen it three times.”  He went on to say that there are “two ways to use God’s name.  You can desecrate it, which makes people feel bad, or you can sanctify it, which is an uplifting experience.”  The implication was that When Do We Eat? is an uplifting experience.  “Even the part where the young man sins with his cousin is good, because it’s real.  It’s reality.  And he makes it okay because he bounces back.”

 

So if this type of “bouncing” is your cup of tea (or, rather, your cup of Manischewitz), here’s good news:  When Do We Eat? opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 7th.