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Boston Jewish Film Festival
Eli and Ben
Tonight, 7 pm
Coolidge Corner Theater
Sold out, though there will be a standby line for all-festival "Friends" passes. Eli and Ben plays again on Saturday at the MFA.
Eli and Ben, the opening film for this year's Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a far more muted affair than last year's The Deal. In this post-Madoff world, the showy tale of a Hollywood flim-flam man whose defining strength is his ability to talk story, the ability to effortlessly pile layers of lies on top of each other, is somehow out of step and no longer palatable. There's been too much artifice already. Times call for quieter, more restrained movies such as this one, a coming-of-age story that looks not so much at the loss of an innocence as a genealogy of morality. Bonus: Eli and Ben also happens to be a pretty good movie.
Where The Deal was bombastic and uninteresting as anything other than a rumination on the Jewishness of Jewish film, Eli and Ben is a universal story of learning about your parents, coming to see them as the flawed human beings they are. That the flaw is ostensibly Ben's financial corruption only adds to its timely appeal, but the specifics are secondary to the general ideal of truth and honesty. The message is simple, but its treatment is so thoroughly unpreachy and unrevelatory as to be quite satisfying.
Eli (Yuval Shevakh) is a wild student, just at the age when he's interested in girls, with an uncertain place in the school social hierarchy. Ben (Lior Ashkenazi), his father, is an architect turned city planner in the posh Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. Ben's is an extremely comfortable domestic life, uninspiring. His own father, one of the most successful architects in Israel, regularly stops in to make grandiose statements about art. Theirs is the reverse of the relationship between Eli and Ben: Eli wants to know who his father really is, while Ben's father doesn't ever care to see past surface beauty.
Eli and Ben is at some times delicately acted, though at others decidedly not; Yuval Shevakh's performance breaks at moments when we suspect he hasn't lived the experience, during moments of emotional extremity. Overall, Eli's emotional growth is more static than we would want from a child actor, where the emphasis has to be placed on development, but the portrayal is natural. Ori Ravid's direction is steady. This is unflashy-though-assured storytelling, a guiding hand moving us from place to place, seldom overbearing. And somehow, in a movie where none of the individual components are outstanding, the end result almost is.
The Boston Jewish Film Festival opens tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. View the full schedule here, or buy tickets here. As noted, Eli and Ben is sold out tonight but plays again on Saturday, November 7 at 7PM at the MFA. Tickets are sold out online but available at the MFA in person or by phone at 617-369-3306.
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