Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, and directed, like his Duddy Kravitz, by Ted Kotcheff: on the apparent principle that if lightning came close once, it might come closer next time. Instead it came further. For all the period production and powdery-smeary photography and leaps in time and place, it remains irretrievably literary: overcompressed and pell-mell in construction, with first-person narration to stitch up the holes, and overstuffed with verbal shtick (father's back-to-back lectures on sex and religion, for instance). And it is as grimly determined to be funny -- albeit in a Jewish liberal-ribald-intellectual vein -- as any TV sitcom, and as damaged in credibility in consequence (mother's striptease at her son's bar mitzvah, for instance). With James Woods, Alan Arkin, Gabrielle Lazure, and Michael Sarrazin. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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