#menashe

2018 Awards Season

Our reviews of the week’s new releases:

Atomic Blonde

Brigsby Bear

Escapes

Menashe

Person to Person

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Women Who Kill

From the Land of the Moon

The Incredible Jessica James

While my full opinion is more detailed, I’m sorry to report that overall the movie Menashe was an incredibly uncomfortable hot mess of a disappointment. 😕

So some background on the film: while it’s based (to exactly what degree I don’t know) on the life of the main actor and almost all the actors (except the little boy) are chasidish in real life, the director and co-writers are 2 secular Jews and a non-Jew - in other words, outsiders to the world they’re portraying.

This had the potential to be a FANTASTIC collaboration: the filmmakers could have used their knowledge and skill, combined with the lived experience of the actors, to show their (mostly outsider) audience a picture of a different world that is complex, multifaceted, flawed, but also beautiful (you know, like basically every other human society). They could have used this film to humanize the individuals and society they were portraying to a demographic that largely views it as alien and inscrutable.

But instead, they created a cast of characters that is universally unsympathetic (most of them are blatantly terrible people, and even the one we’re supposed to like, the protagonist, at one point hits his child and doesn’t really seem to show any remorse; the child is as close as it comes to sympathetic, except there is zero emotional development and his actions lack any understandable motivation). They portrayed a two-dimensional world that confirms every possible negative stereotype an outsider audience member could possibly have about Orthodox Jews: no one ever really seems happy (ESPECIALLY the women, all of whom look miserable, and multiple of whom verbally express being so), religion when explicitly addressed (and not just in the background of a scene) is always used as a tool of coercion, marriages are forced and unhappy, negative things that are NOT mainstream are portrayed as such (e.g. women not driving) and mentioned apropos of nothing (literally nothing to do with the plot, basically just used as “world building” so to speak).

And perhaps the worst thing is that the chasidish actors’ involvement legitimizes the marketing of this film as a “glimpse into the chasidic world.” (I have a lot of thoughts as to why they were ok with participating in this story as it was told, but they’ll have to be saved for another time since I’m on mobile.)