M is for Matriarch: “Greek Mothers Never Die”

With Mothers Day on the horizon, I’ve started thinking about movies in which mothers are front and center. All kinds of mothers. Noble, self-sacrificing mothers (Stella Dallas). Shrill harridans who make their kids’ lives miserable (Mommie Dearest).  In a dark comedic vain, mothers who mean well but drive their children crazy (Throw Momma from the Train).

In a special category are family films showcasing American kids who chafe against the rules and superstitions of their old-world mothers. Such films, comedies with a sharp edge, blend a scrutiny of family relationships with the humor we find in newcomers (or those remaining close to their immigrant roots) who don’t quite fit into their American surroundings. There was a time, back in the early Philip Roth era (let’s say the late 1960s) when Jewish mothers were considered comedy gold. The stereotype of the abrasive, all-consuming Jewish Mother shows up in movies made from works by such hot young novelists as Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman. See, of course, Portnoy’s Complaint (filmed in 1972 with Lee Grant in the mother role). And, in the same category, see portrayals by Shelley Winters in films like Next Stop, Greenwich Village and Over the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Of course, other ethnicities have their own humor focused on moms who refuse to let go of what they see as their duty to the families they’ve created. There’s a touch of this in the hit 1987 comedy, Moonstruck, which won Olympia Dukakis an Oscar for her portrayal of the Italian-American family matriarch. Ironically, although Dukakis came from Greek immigrant stock on both sides, she was nowhere to be seen in 2002’s huge indie hit, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, in which Mama was memorably played by Lainie Kazan. 

The longterm public enthusiasm surrounding My Big Fat Greek Wedding—which spawned two sequels and a 2003 sitcom—has seemed to propel Greek Americans into the ranks of funny foreigners with crazy accents and wacky beliefs. Just in time for Mothers Day, writer-director-actor Rachel Suissa gives us Greek Mothers Never Die, a well-meaning comedy that juxtaposes an epic mother/daughter clash with the kind of supernatural underpinnings that mark generations of movies like All of Me, Death Becomes Her, and (for those with long memories ) the Topper series.

 In the Topper movies and the later TV sitcom, a stuffy bank president is haunted by the ghosts of a fun-loving young couple (originally played by Constance Bennett and Cary Grant) who try to teach him to relax and enjoy life. The dead (and very Greek) mother in Greek Mothers Never Die constantly shows herself to her daughter, an aspiring singer now living on an island in Florida, to dispense maternal wisdom about life’s dangers. In Mama Despina’s mind, olive oil is the nectar of the gods, and pretty much everything else on earth (from butter to pre-marital sex) may well lead to cancer. But though she’ll never dispense with worry and warnings, Despina truly has daughter Ella’s best interests at heart. She can orchestrate a dandy makeover, and knows just which young doctor will be the right future mate for her late-blooming little girl. (A telling moment: on Ella and Nick’s first romantic night together, guess who shows up lying between them?) 

This is not the sort of movie in which traditional Greek religion occupies much of a role. The characters hardly feel a deep link to their Greek Orthodox faith. Still, there’s room for some amusing ancient Greek mythological deities (Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, and so on) to comment on the romantic action. But Mama is the true deus ex machina here.

The film is released by Gravitas Ventures and is now available on AppleTV+

 

Spoiler Alert: Seeing The Last of Mrs. Maisel

Well, Midge Maisel has gone to her reward, which seems to involve lounging on a couch in a mansion, watching Jeopardy with still-buddy Susie. It’s not the ending I would have chosen for the final season of this memorable sitcom. But wrap-ups are hard. All the emotion we’ve put into watching the evolution of the often fractious Maisel/Weissman clan  over five years of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is supposed to pay off in the final episodes. But for me, the fifth season turned out to be a hodgepodge of scrambled stories, skipping back and forth through time in an effort to sum up everyone’s situation. I would have been content to see Midge—the affluent late  Fifties housewife who was dumped by her Nice Jewish Boy husband, only to discover her natural gift for stand-up comedy—go out either a winner or a loser. But the writers seemed to want to have it both ways. Midge scores the TV gig that makes everyone, both family and the viewing public, adore her.  Hooray! But then we have to endure the painful disintegration of her friend, Lenny Bruce, and several additional mordant moments  before that couch scene (featuring Susie in a mop of a grey wig and a caftan) with its final fadeout.

 The fifth season has been like that from start to finish. Several episodes begin, at first bafflingly, with flash-forwards to Midge’s now-adult children. I liked the possibilities of a full-grown Ethan picking vegetables and studying rabbinics on an Israeli kibbutz, though Midge suddenly landing in a helicopter to check out him and his cranky Sabra bride seems a pretty lame joke. As for daughter Esther, previously seen only as tiny child, it took me a while to figure out that SHE had grown up to be the brilliant young scientist discussing family with her shrink in this season’s opening episode. There is also a wacky suggestion that Midge is at one point about to marry novelist Philip Roth in a lavish Hawaiian ceremony. This brief plot strand—enlivened by parents Rose and Abe’s predictable hysteria—quickly disappears both from the series and from the characters’ psyches, as do some of the key relationships from previous seasons. Case in point: ex-husband Joel’s feisty Chinese-American spouse-to-be, along with their impending child. (Actress Stephanie Hsu who played Mei Lin,  has done very well for herself lately, nabbing an Oscar nomination for Everything Everywhere All at Once. So perhaps she had to be surgically removed from Joel’s and the viewer’s mind.)

 Why was I a fan of this series? Perhaps because it was such a funny and familiar take on ethnic tribalism, along with an acknowledgment of what young women faced in the Mad Men era Two of my favorite characters were Midge’s parents, played by Marin Hinkle and the invaluable Tony Shalhoub. Their obsessions with style (her) and intellectualism (him) always rang true, and their relationship with one another had the hilarious push-and-pull of many a marriage. Their firm grasp of their Jewish social and religious values were, to me at least, funny but never insulting. My very favorite season was the one in which the whole family group decamps to a legendary resort in the Catskills (read: Grossinger’s). Later, when the resort’s beloved social director opens a play on Broadway, Abe is put in the terrible position having to review this stinker for the Village Voice. Quickly he pays the price, as an entire congregation of his peers audibly shames him during High Holiday services for betraying one of their own. It’s uproariously funny, and it sure feels real.

 

White Makes Right: “The Plot Against America”

Right now, with state governors being accused of Nazism for not allowing the opening of gyms and hair salons in the midst of a health pandemic, The Plot Against America seems timely indeed. This six-part HBO miniseries, based on a 2004 novel by Philip Roth, wrestles with the idea of real Nazis and with powerful Americans all too ready to ally with them to achieve their own hateful goals.

We’re all familiar by now with Quentin Tarantino’s playful reshaping of our twentieth-century past.  In Tarantino’s hands, Adolf Hitler is assassinated and Sharon Tate emerges unscathed from the Manson murder plot. These are films that relieve us—for the moment—from the burden of history by showing us that real-life horror has a happy outcome. The Plot Against America goes in the opposite direction, starting with a happily middle-class Newark family, circa 1940, and positing the rise of a fascist ideology that puts their hopes and their very lives in danger.

The linchpin of all this in Roth’s novel is the unexpected election of “lone eagle” Charles Lindbergh over Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the presidency. Lindbergh, the airline pilot who became a national hero for his solo trip across the Atlantic, is well known to have harbored anti-Semitic views and  to have sympathetic feelings for the German high command. (He also, in later decades, secretly fathered seven children by three different German women while remaining married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh—but that’s a story for another day.) Running on an anti-war platform that favors a friendly alliance with Nazi Germany, President Lindbergh puts in place an “America First” regime that looks down on immigrants and their offspring, and is all too quick to use race-baiting to sow domestic discord.

The Levin family—husband, wife, and two young sons—are proudly Jewish and proudly American. (In his novel, Roth chose to give them the first and last names of his own family members and settle them all at his own boyhood New Jersey address.) They admire Lindbergh’s achievements, but are leery of him as a political figure. Not so one of the story’s most enigmatic characters, Rabbi Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), who through a combination of personal vanity and misguided belief is sure the Lindbergh presidency will be a glorious one, in which he has personally been tapped to play a key role.  His marriage to Bess Levin’s idealistic sister Evelyn (Winona Ryder) puts the Levin family at the center of the drama, when they are “selected” to move to Kentucky as part of a new federal program designed to absorb them more thoroughly into the American fabric. Of course, as Rabbi Bengelsdorf fails to see, its long-range implications are ominous for anyone who deviates slightly from the American mainstream.  (Kentucky, where kindly farmers co-exist with the Ku Klux Klan, does not exactly come off well.) 

As fascistic impulses rise in the United States, tensions pit  cousin against cousin and father against son. A powerful moment near the end involving sisters Evelyn and Bess (a deeply sympathetic Zoe Kazan) shows what can be accomplished in a scene that triumphantly passes the so-called Bechdel Test: two women talking together about something other than a man. Writers David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire) have been deeply faithful to the work of Roth, who consulted with them at the beginning of the project. But, as conveyed in a fascinating podcast about the making of the series, they go Roth one better in figuring out how to end their drama. It’s election day in America, and we can all share the shivers that date implies.

Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth: New York Stories

My presence in New York City seems to be hazardous to authors. While I was working in Manhattan recently, the nation and the world lost two of its literary best. Tom Wolfe, the man responsible for what’s been called the New Journalism, died in New York City on May 14, at the age of 88. Eight days later, novelist Philip Roth passed away in Manhattan at age 85. Coincidence? I suppose so.

Tom Wolfe, not to be confused with the Thomas Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward, Angel in 1929, was like him a Southerner by birth. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he gravitated toward the Big Apple, from whence he chronicled social cliques and oddities in such works as Radical Chic and The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. A flamboyant presence in his white suits, he himself became as famous as his writing. He showed up in countless documentaries, and was even featured as a version of himself on an episode of The Cosby Show called “Superstar.” He also dabbled a bit in filmmaking. In 1984 The Right Stuff, the Philip Kaufman film based on Wolfe’s lively non-fiction chronicle of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, won four Oscars and was nominated for four more, including Best Picture.

Alas, Wolfe’s other major Hollywood outing was not so successful. Wolfe published in 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, an outrageous satire about greed, racism, politics, and other deadly sins in contemporary New York City. This best-selling novel was purchased by Warner Bros. Then all hell broke loose. The original director, Mike Nichols, was replaced by Brian De Palma. Casting controversies led to key plot changes, with Tom Hanks’ character rendered more sympathetic and Bruce Willis cast in a role that should have gone to an Englishman. A Jewish judge from the novel was turned into Morgan Freeman, as the studio sought to mute any criticism of the film’s racial politics. Bad artistic decisions were rife, and the film became such a critical and financial flop that in 1991 Wall Street Journal film critic Julie Salamon put forth a tell-all book called The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood.

Philip Roth’s Hollywood career had fewer highs and fewer lows. Roth started out as a chronicler of Jewish life in Newark, penning acerbic tales of suburban culture clashes in a memorable little 1959 collection called Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award for fiction. A decade later, the title story was made into a popular film, starring Richard Benjamin and a star-in-the-making, Ali MacGraw. Highly popular at the box office, Goodbye, Columbus won a few Golden Globes, and its script was Oscar-nominated. In 1972, Roth became notorious as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, with its kinky blend of ethnicity and sex (especially masturbation humor). Needless to say, the translation of Roth’s offbeat sensibilities to the screen was a challenge. Richard Benjamin again played the apparent Roth surrogate, with Lee Grant as his monstrous Jewish mother. Both critics and audiences were appalled, and Roth steered clear of Hollywood for some three decades.

Over the years, Roth’s fiction has become more solemn and less sexy. In 2003, his The Human Stain was adapted into a serious film starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins. In 2016, actor Ewan McGregor made his directorial debut with Roth’s American Pastoral, a painful tale of family turmoil amid the radical social impulses of the Sixties. As in the case with The Human Stain,  the film version made few ripples. Roth was often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s too late for that now.