Shabbat Shalom, Hey?

Some days you just can’t get rid of a body, especially when it’s Shabbos and you aren’t allowed to move a corpse on the day of rest. You also shouldn’t commit manslaughter—on Shabbos or a weekday—but that’s exactly the pickle the Gelfand family find themselves facing in Bad Shabbos, Daniel Robbins’s tumultuous new comedy about the underappreciated dangers of a Friday night meal.

David (Jon Bass) is a nice Jewish boy bringing home his nice Gentile fiancée, Meg (Meghan Leathers), for Friday night dinner. Tensions always run higher than the family’s Upper West Side apartment building, even when Meg’s very Catholic, very Midwestern, very tall parents are not coming over. Meg is planning to convert, which isn’t important to David and isn’t really good enough for David’s mother, Ellen. Played by a brittle Kyra Sedgwick, Ellen is stereotypically distraught over her eldest son’s choice of partner. Her husband, Richard (David Paymer, apparently straight off the set of a Woody Allen movie), is neurotically hooked on the Alexander technique for bodily awareness and his idiosyncratic interpretation of “nonviolent communication.”

It’s a packed house that night. David’s sister Abby (Milana Vayntrub) is coming to dinner too and is delaying calling it quits with her dirtbag boyfriend, Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman). Meanwhile, the youngest son, the skinny, manic Adam (brilliantly portrayed by Theo Taplitz), works out in his bedroom, delusionally “training for the IDF” and popping pills to keep calm—“I’m always one Klonopin away from complete serenity.” Oh, and Benjamin’s there too, but he’s dead in the bathroom, pooling blood on the shower mat.

As far as respect for the dead goes, this movie has little of it, since Benjamin’s death, caused by a laxative-induced colitis emergency and a slippery bathroom floor, is really a farcical vehicle for uncovering delightful, dysfunctional family dynamics. Adam, who slipped the fatal laxatives into Benjamin’s drink, declares, “I can handle warfare. . . . But not jail. I can’t do jail,” and insists in an increasingly squeaky voice that the whole situation was “a harmless accident.” David is vainly trying to remain calm, while Abby, unconvincingly mourning the boyfriend she was about to dump, is just trying to keep her mom from learning that she drove there on Shabbos. The parents are desperate for “anything, anything that could possibly save Adam,” whom they dote on, and only Meg has the actual calm to try and plot out their next steps of transferring Benjamin back to his apartment—“Give him one of those New York deaths . . . you know, somebody dies in their apartment and then they just lay there for a couple of days until they start to smell.” The dialogue ping-pongs back and forth faster than Adam can swallow Klonopins, while the viewer, who is, of course, not worried if the Gelfands will get out of this mess, can’t wait to find out how.

Writer-director Daniel Robbins has a background in horror comedy, thus the occasional jump scare, the tense score, and the murder. The film takes cues from other corpse comedies (to coin a phrase) such as Weekend at Bernie’s, Clue,and the original film of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock’s dry The Trouble with Harry. Core to the genre is that nobody is particularly upset about the death at hand. Despite his penchant for horror, Robbins’s directorial style doesn’t owe much to Hitchcock but rather aspires to Woody Allen, with a few Wes Anderson–esque cutaways to a zooming e-bike thrown in. There’s some sharp framing, but the focus is mainly on the zingers, which are often funny, in the way that Meet the Parents was funny.

Bad Shabbos has a lot of Jews in it, but is it good representation for the Jews? That sort of question has swirled around the so-called discourse at least since Philip Roth wrote about a nice Jewish man who catches an STD from an extramarital affair. His short story “Epstein” incited outrage and opprobrium when it was first published in 1958. Roth complained bitterly about Jews who complained bitterly about his story: “There are Jewish readers, I know, who cannot figure out why I found it necessary to tell this story about a Jewish man: don’t other people commit adultery, too? Why is it the Jew who must be shown cheating?” The answer, Roth somewhat pedantically protested too much, was that “the story is called ‘Epstein’ because Epstein, not the Jews, is the subject.” Pair that with Irving Howe’s withering accusation in 1972 that Roth’s understanding of Jews and Judaism was “thin,” and you’re more or less caught up on two major Jewish criticisms of American Jewish art.

That isn’t to say that the criticisms are always wrong or unfair. Take, for example, the recent Netflix show Nobody Wants This, a rom-com about a Reformish rabbi who falls in love with a non-Jewish woman. The portrayals are mean-spirited in a way that suggests the show’s writers simply couldn’t be bothered to think past cliches. The female Jewish characters are bossy, grumpy, and overbearing, and in one particularly distasteful scene, the rabbi’s mother is seen shiftily eating pork out of the trash. You see, it’s funny because she’s a hypocrite.

Bad Shabbos is better than that. But its presentation of Jewish culture can be distractingly vague for insiders—thin, you might say. Are the Gelfands Conservative or Orthodox? Why do they get their challahs at the only kosher-style Barney Greengrass but shun driving on Shabbos? How do they sing Sholem Aleichem each Friday night when the only Hebrew Adam knows is a rough approximation of the Aleph Bet? (“How can you go to the IDF, you don’t even speak the language?” Ellen demands. “I know the Al. Eph. Bet. The building blocks of the language.”) When Ellen opens the oven door, why isn’t she bothered by turning on the oven light?

The movie certainly has its share of cliches. When Kyra Sedgwick’s character first finds out about her son’s engagement, her response is “I just started mourning my father. Now I have to mourn my son.” Meg, the non-Jewish fiancée, is the one who ultimately reminds the family about the true meaning of Judaism—or something like that. And the doorman Jordan, hilariously portrayed by the rapper Method Man (a former member of the Wu-Tang Clan), is a textbook example of what Spike Lee has called the “Magical Negro”—a black character whose function is to save the day for the white protagonists and teach them an important life lesson. So, do the cliches and tropes derail the film, leaving it thin and mean-spirited? Is it good for anyone?

Jordan and the Gelfands have a ticking clock to beat—the arrival of Meg’s parents and of the night shift doorman (on the aforementioned Wes Anderson scooter). After some flailing about—during which Richard unhelpfully tries to solve the problem of moving a corpse on Shabbos by placing a piece of bread on it and thus rabbinically transmuting it into a serving platter—Meg’s parents arrive, and cringe comedy ensues. Meg’s father (played by the delightful John Bedford Lloyd) declines to wear a kippa—“I’m just not much of a hat guy”—and Meg’s mother, Beth, (Catherine Curtin)—peruses the family’s ArtScroll mahzorim with an air of confused distaste. It all goes downhill from there: Wine is spilled, soup is thrown, Jewish space lasers are invoked, and Jordan pretends to be Benjamin, an Ethiopian Jew (“From . . . Ethiopia?” Meg’s father deadpans). Meg’s parents are insulted and ushered out of the home, so that the Gelfands can get back to figuring out how to dispose of the body.

With minutes to spare in screen time, everything is wrapped up nicely. Family tensions are resolved, the body is dealt with by Jordan, and amends are made with Meg’s parents, who figured out just enough to engage in some playful blackmail over holiday first dibs on David and Meg. Cue the credits, which, somewhat oddly in this Jewish film, roll to an R&B song.

This isn’t a film with an awful lot to say about Judaism or anything else, but it knows that. For instance, Robbins and his screenwriting partner Zack Weiner are clearly aware that Jordan is a classic “Magical Negro”: the character’s last shot shows him smiling and strolling out into a pearly white hallway as the Gelfand family gaze at him with awe and affection and two police officers stare at the scene in confusion. The trope hasn’t been subverted, but Robbins and Weiner want to clue us in that it’s part of the joke. Don’t come to Bad Shabbos for deep thoughts about Black-Jewish relations or American Judaism; come to it for slapstick with matza balls instead of banana cream pies.

Unlike Nobody Wants This, which at least thinks it has something to say about American Judaism, Bad Shabbos doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. And, more importantly, the characters are all drawn with affection. These days, in Jewish film, TV, and literature, it can feel like the (generally Jewish) writers actively dislike their Jewish protagonists. Nobody Wants This, A Real Pain, and Long Island Compromise are all recent works whose characters are in some way flawed because of their Judaism. Whatever Philip Roth intended in early stories like Epstein, in the new stories, Jews and Judaism are the subject.

It seems like every month, the internet brings forth a new listicle of Jewish movies and TV shows to watch. What great works make up these lists? Bob Dylan’s biopic A Complete Unknown gets added because Dylan is Jewish and Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, is Jewish, even though the movie is completely uninterested in why and how Robert Zimmerman became Dylan. Nobody Wants This always gets a nod because we can confirm there are yarmulkes on our screens. This hunt for Jews as subject feels oddly desperate, but it’s a reflection of Jewish viewers who hunger for more presentation and representation. That hunger for more creates an anxiety—is the little we do have a good representation? An honest presentation of the subject?

In Bad Shabbos, a cartoonish but recognizable Upper West Side Judaism is the context, not the subject. But its broader context is a world in which we feel inclined to quibble over the misrepresentations in the film or overly celebrate the entire undertaking. Perhaps it would be better if it were just another fun film playing at the local AMC—which it’s not, but I’m sure it’s coming soon to a JCC near you.