Reuniting the Rubins, the movie that opens the 15th Miami Jewish Film Festival on Saturday, preaches to the converted. Timothy Spall (from The King’s Speech and the Harry Potter pictures) plays Lenny, a successful lawyer planning to set sail on his dream retirement cruise when his mother (Honor Blackman) takes ill and is hospitalized. Knowing her life is winding down, she asks Lenny to round up his four kids so they can all have one last Passover Seder together.
But bringing the family together won’t be easy, because Lenny’s children lead the kinds of radically different lives only a screenwriter would dream up. Danny (James Callis) is a workaholic businessman. Andie (Rhona Mitra) is a save-the-planet activist in Africa. Yona (Hugh O’Conor) is a rabbi in Jerusalem and Clarity (Asier Newman) is a Buddhist monk. How’s that for wacky comic diversity?
Writer-director Yoav Factor aims for heart-warming poignancy amongst all the funny bickering and antics, but there were episodes of Eight is Enough that had a more sophisticated and complex view on family ties. Reuniting the Rubins has a much better cast than this pedestrian material deserved: Spall, an actor who excels at portraying exasperation, holds your attention even when the rest of the movie doesn’t, and Blackman has some good moments as the aging matriarch who can’t understand why her grandkids can’t get along. By film’s end, many important lessons are learned, narrow perspectives are expanded and even the broadest caricatures remind you of someone in your own family.
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