Prickly relationships between fathers and sons, messy divorces and radical personal awakenings. All are subjects tackled by two searing, semiautobiographical films by Jewish directors now playing in Los Angeles.
Many people with aging parents don\’t want to face their eventual death, said Rachelle Elias, a licensed marriage and family therapist and grief specialist in Santa Monica. \”We believe that, since they\’ve been here all of my life, they\’re a fixture. They\’ll always be here.
\”Also, the small child part of us sees our parents as a buffer between us and anything bad that might happen. They\’re sort of a place of refuge, even if it\’s just in our mind.\”
When Paul Reiser co-created and starred in the 1990s hit sitcom, \”Mad About You,\” — about a secular Jew married to a Christian — he helped spur a new trend in TV comedy: the cute but neurotic Jewish leading man.
In his raw, autobiographical monologue, \”Who Is Floyd Stearn?\” actor Michael Raynor struts onstage with a swagger reminiscent of James Caan. Raynor, playing himself, jabs a finger at a faded photograph.\nThe photo was taken on 185th Street in Queens, on his grandmother\’s lawn. In the photo, an athletic, brawny man embraces a 3-year-old. The man is Raynor\’s father, Floyd Stearn. The smiling boy is young Michael, who clutches a toy banjo, his blond bangs peeking out from a cowboy hat.\n\nRaynor tells the audience that, even at 40, he cannot discuss the photo; should anyone pressure him, he angrily departs.\n\n\”Every time I see the picture I cry,\” he adds quietly. \”That\’s why I can\’t look at it. I see the happiness in my face, and it scares me. I\’m hoping it won\’t go away.\”
When singer Yasmin Levy was 8, she helped destroy hundreds of tapes her late father had recorded of songs in Ladino, the ancient language of Spanish Jewry.
In a few weeks I\’ll turn 33 and, sadly, I realize I\’m long past being anything \”for my age.\” I\’m no longer cute for my age, talented for my age, a good reader for my age. All qualifications and special considerations have long passed. There\’s nothing I can get away with now because, \”After all, your honor, he\’s only 33.\”
In one night, I had dinner at an all-you-can eat salad bar in Arcadia, met my father\’s first girlfriend in 25 years and weathered a nearly disastrous poetry emergency.
Sound the onomatopoetic sirens; this thing was a relationship 911. Free verse was about to cost my father the best relationship of his life. And it was my fault. What rhymes with \”Zero tact\”?
So there I was, sitting across the table from dad\’s new girlfriend, trying to impress her, using my best table manners, eating forkfuls of canned beets on my self-consciously dainty salad and thinking to myself: \”This is just weird.\”
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