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).
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