Reel Critic - 10/7/10

MOVIE | Holy Rollers
DIRECTOR | Kevin Asch

Holy Rollers can’t seem to decide if it’s a coming-of-age character drama, a cautionary parable about two cultural extremes or a straightforward crime drama.  I suppose it’s more the first than anything, but I also suspect that it is ambitious enough to aim for all three.  Such a blend would require real subtlety and finesse, and it does not deliver on all counts, but it creates a number of moving and indelible moments over the course of its 89 minutes.

The film — which was written by Antonio Macia ’99, and screened in Dana Auditorium on Thursday (co-sponsored by Hillel and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity) — recounts the story (based on a true one) of teenager Sam Gold’s involvement in a drug-running operation in the 90s that recruited Hasidic Jews to smuggle ecstasy pills into America. Sam, played by Jesse Eisenberg (currently invading your world as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) comes from a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood himself, and is on the fast track to becoming a community mensch (studying to be a Rabbi, arranged marriage, etc.).  But when his future wife’s family rescinds their wedding offer, possibly because of Sam’s father’s prideful scorn for money and luxury, a sudden bout of angst and greed drives Sam to get involved with Israeli drug smuggler Jackie by way of skeevy neighbor Yosef (Justin Bartha).

In his extremely honest and humble Q&A session following the film, Macia mentioned that turning the Hasidic way of life into a caricature was one of his main concerns when writing the film. On this note, he succeeds; there are a few cheap jokes about a culturally isolated Jewish teenager being exposed to new things, but Sam’s nuclear family is portrayed with real care and empathy. We can see how Sam would be frustrated, considering their poverty, with his father’s stubborn insistence that Sam work only in their family’s fabric shop. But it’s clear that his father is fundamentally a good man, and the film portrays this conflict quite well, showing us both the pros and the cons of their lifestyle.

Eisenberg’s strong acting also brings out the essential conflict in Sam’s character, causing us to root for him even though we see him indulge most of his bad tendencies over the course of the story. We root for him to end up with Rachel (played well by Ari Graynor) despite the immaturity of their relationship, and some of the film’s sweetest moments come with watching them struggle to interact in a world that neither of them really belongs in.

In general, the really great moments in Holy Rollers come when it dials back on dialogue and relies on mood, as in the pulsing club scenes made hazy by ecstasy. The film is an intimate one, filled with small moments despite taking place in big cities. But in spite of many wonderful, small character moments, the ending feels abrupt and leaves the impression that many of its themes — namely Sam’s conflicted psychology and his underlying vulnerability — were not explored deeply enough. But Holy Rollers is by no means a failure, as its well-humanized characters and many intimate moments create a lovely lingering mood that stuck with me after I left the theater.