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Kyra Sedgwick: "Bad Shabbos"

 There is something slightly tone-deaf in this script. The heroine--who is generally portrayed as intelligent and sensible--sits with her devout Jewish mother-in-law and says this: "I'm enjoying getting to know the Old Testament. It's like I knew the main story--the Gospels--and now I'm reading the prequel."


This sort of astoundingly foolish remark is met with a stinging reply: "Take your online conversion classes or don't. I feel like I've had a beautiful ceramic flower pot--it was given by one ancestor to another, to another, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. And now I'm tossing it to a stranger--who has taken half of one on-line intro course with regard to gardening."

I'm not quick to dismiss misanthropic writing. I do not demand that central characters in any work should seem "relatable." But I do require consistency. The brittleness of the characters in "Bad Shabbos" comes and goes. Sometimes, it seems we're required to think of these characters as boys-and-girls-next-door. Other times: not so much.

Also, it's odd when the heroine decides to speak to her mother-in-law about colitis. "My teacher says it's great that I'm deepening your gene pool. My formerly-Gentile genes will dilute the power of colitis." Again, the heroine is not represented as a Sacha Baron Cohen character; in other moments, she seems to be reasonably sharp. Certain choices are just puzzling.

I did enjoy a tense stand-off about watermelons. One nervous guest wants to slice watermelons--"it's among the few things I can do"--and the hostess is clearly distressed when she understands that she must delegate tasks. In a delightful twist, the watermelons are "butchered"; they are roughly sliced, when the "house style" is to produce perfect, tiny cubes. The moments of charged silence--with regard to the watermelon slices--are among the finest moments in this film.

One thumb up. One thumb is tucked tightly into my fist.
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