Eric Steel | Minyan / 2020

leaving by remaining

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Steel and Daniel Pearle (screenplay, based on the story by David Bezmozgis), Eric Steel (director) Minyan / 2020

 

It is sometimes difficult for me to comprehend why a fine feature film like Minyan does virtually no business at the box office. While the film directed by Eric Steel may not be visually spectacular—although there are some very nice street and club scenes, and the couple of sexual encounters between the character David (Samuel H. Levine) and Bruno (Alex Hurt) are as hot as any non-porno out there—the narrative of this film is a nuanced and quite complex story involving religion, sexuality, politics, disease, culture, and history. Perhaps I just answered my own question, I’m afraid. Are contemporary film-goers still afraid of just those topics, particularly when they are woven together into a net so tight that they actually trap their major characters into their weave.

     Perhaps the fact that there are no true villains in Steel’s Minyan sets it apart. The viewer can be disgusted about various characters and their control over others, but gradually Steel’s and Pearle’s screenplay reveals that even the apparent controllers have been forced into their positions. There are no true heroes here; perhaps as in far too many Jewish and gay movies, there are only survivors.

     Yet the humanity of this film, which reveals nearly all its characters’ passions and flaws, is so overwhelming that one might imagine that empathy alone might have sent this film into major theaters. Perhaps today we are asked to share far too many lives of others outside of our immediate experience so that we have become numb and uncaring. I wish I might be able to wipe that sentence out with a simple backspace, but I’m afraid it may be true. Some of us, at least, seek out those experiences outside of the narrow confines of our own births, nurture, and subsequent values.

    Perhaps it’s simply the numerous seeming contradictions of the world presented in this film that kept audiences away. Steel’s landscape is, after all, the narrowly confined world of basically Russian Jewish immigrants in the 1980s Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn.

     The central character in this film is a rather typical 17-year-old boy, David (Levine) who, under the control of his somewhat embittered mother, Rachel (Brooke Bloom) and an always-straying sexist and violent father, is forced to attend a Jewish school, despite his desire to be acclimated into the new world into which they’ve entered. His mother, however, sees herself as protecting her son who she believes, unlike back in Russia, will not get daily beaten for being a Jew.

      We later discover that she was trained as a dentist, but in the US can only get a job as a dental receptionist, seeing some real clients after hours. Her husband Simon (Gera Sandler), a former boxer, is a physical therapist, using his employment mostly as an excuse to massage and pleasure willing women.

     Understandably, David, increasingly realizing the difference of his sexual desires from his friends such as Nathan (Zane Pais), gravitates to his far more open-minded, but still religious grandfather, Josef (brilliant played by Ron Rifkin). Josef is what you might describe as an intense realist, one who sees his faith as important in a larger context, but doesn’t perceive the laws of the Torah as being as confining as the Rabbis see them to be. He is for love and kindness. And when his wife dies is both saddened and relieved to move on into a smaller space that perhaps might not remind him of her more literal-minded views of life. The problem is in all of New York, how does an older man with little income to find a reasonable apartment. Even in his smaller space, David is willing to move in, just to escape his parent’s control and his father’s occasional brutality when he thinks his son is behaving as a “passive pansy.”

      Moreover, as he travels into the East Village with his friends at night, who visit the local whore houses, he is attracted to a local gay bar, Nowhere. Moreover, his grandfather allows him to enroll in a public school, where he meets up with a local teacher (Chinaza Uche) who has assigned them to read James Baldwin, and after David makes a brilliant interpretive comment about the book, quickly becomes a favorite student.

     Finally, a rabbi named Zalman (Richard Topol) who evidently controls the choice of tenants in a high-rise building has agreed to see Josef, whom David accompanies to the interview. The rabbi, barraged by a long list of possible renters, is mostly in search of religious Jews who might make up the minyan necessary to provide a religious service, and agrees to Josef’s occupation only if David moves in with him, making up the necessary 10 males they need for the ceremony.

     Next door to them are two elderly Jewish men, Herschel (Christopher McCann) and Itzik (Mark Margolis), who have been fellow soldiers together back in Russia and, having both lost their wives, have moved in together. But David soon perceives through the film’s subtle clues (their two toothbrushes sharing a small bathroom container) and the single bed they share, quickly realizes that they are actually gay, perhaps having been in love since their long-ago military service. David lovingly attends to their needs for a simple change of a kitchen light bulb and correction of their toilet. Josef, meanwhile, finds an elderly woman friend in his new building.

     In a shocking turn of events, David discovers that his best friend Nathan has just volunteered for the Israeli army and will clearly be leaving his life forever.

    He begins to seek elsewhere for his personal pleasure. He discovers the joys of sex in the local public library bathroom and, finally, after daring to visit the Nowhere bar, he begins a brief intense relationship with the bartender Bruno.

      If at first, Bruno seems a loving protector of the new kid (he also is seen to be reading James Baldwin, a rather unsubtle message that needn’t have been part of the narrative), but eventually pushes his away, warning him of the rising issues of AIDS, a subject that this film might easily have skirted, but was brave enough to embrace.

      A beautiful young girl, Alicia (Carson Meyer), who meets him in their schoolroom, also takes an interest in David, her presence in his life immensely pleasing David’s mother, who suddenly becomes almost a younger woman as she treats them to laughing gas in her after hours dental work.

      By this time, however, David has finally begun to understand who he truly is, and now finds himself as a protector of Herschel when his lover Itzik dies, after observing Itzik’s family, which includes his former bartender-lover Bruno, attempting to oust Herschel from the apartment.

    Desperate to protect Herschel, David pleads with Zalman to allow Herschel to remain, even as their apartment furniture has been mostly moved to the street or hauled off by the relatives. Only Herschel’s books remain, some of which, including the stories of Isaac Babel, he shares with the loving and caring David.

      In a final and sudden twist of the plot, we discover that the rabbi has long ago determined to let Herschel remain. As he puts it, "Thieves, adulterers, homosexuals. I take them all, without them, we would never have our minyan, but the one that I was most worried about was you.”

      It appears that David, no matter how he might wish to escape, is swept up into the very world into which he was born, a part of a community who care enough about each other to remain in their increasingly meaningless faith, while seeking temporary escape in a world outside. They are, after all, simple humans, not brilliant interpreters of the Torah or Jewish mystics.

     In the end, perhaps, it is that basically stoic view of an escape by staying put, or leaving by remaining that probably turned off some viewers and critics such as Rafaela Sales Ross, who argues that “all that is left is a nagging hunger for what could have been.” I truly and fully escaped in my personal life, but this film helps to comprehend the lives of those who remained in the worlds in which they grew up without going crazy.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).