-By Frank Lovece
For movie details, please click here.
Jesse Eisenberg has been to
Adventureland and Zomebieland, and in Holy
Rollers he now takes on the Promised Land. Playing a lapsed
Hassidic Jew in 1998 Brooklyn, whose quest for gelt leads
him to an Ecstasy-smuggling ring importing from Amsterdam, he gives
a quietly conflicted performance that unfortunately never builds to
create an understandable human being. Crime is bad. You will feel
guilty. And if God doesn't get you, the police will. Any larger
ideas about the relationship between the decadent and the divine
get muddled in a well-constructed but ultimately unengaging
story.
Based, uncredited, on the Sept. 30, 1999 article "Holy Rollers" by
Ted B. Kissell in the South Florida alternative weekly
Miami New
Times—which details the milieu and eventual arrests of
Canadian-Israeli mastermind Sean Erez and the 18-year-old Hassidic
Jews he recruited, Shimon Levita and Moshe Katz a.k.a. Simcha Roth,
to help run his Ecstasy operation in New York City—the movie
originated when self-described "nightlife maven" Danny A. Abeckaser
read about the case, and decided he wanted to play the Erez role,
here Jackie Solomon. He raised production money and hired indie
producer-distributor Kevin Asch, who'd previously helmed a short,
to direct the four-week feature, shot in New York and Amsterdam.
Scripter Antonio Macia is a Mormon convert writing about Hassidim.
None of these facts bode auspiciously for
Holy Rollers,
which at least can boast a straightforward narrative and a winning,
grinning performance by Justin Bartha as Yosef Zimmerman, the
criminal next-door who lures the disaffected Sam Gold (Eisenberg)
into the fold. Initially semi-believing Josef's claim that they're
just importing helpful medicine that red tape doesn't allow in the
U.S., Sam—whose family just gets by and whose happy but
hard-working father cares less about money than about his son
becoming a rabbi—little by little gives in to the semi-fast life.
That includes falling for Danny's girlfriend, Rachel Apfel (Ari
Graynor, Agent Dunham's sister on TV's "Fringe"), based on the
real-life Diana Reicherter, who for some reason was also called
Rachel.
None of this becomes any more exciting than a night-school business
class, and the internal conflicts are all blunt and didactic. And
hard as Eisenberg tries, we get only the most superficial idea of
who Sam is. With accents that may or may not be authentic but which
come across like Jackie Mason stereotypes—Oy! If I hear da woid
"gelt" one more time, I will plotz!—and uniformly dingy
cinematography,
Holy Rollers hits a speed bump.
Film Review: Holy Rollers
Low-key, low-budget drama based on a real-life 1990s drug-smuggling ring involving Hassidic Jews trudges along with a simplistic, heavy-handed message.
May 20, 2010
-By Frank Lovece
Jesse Eisenberg has been to Adventureland and Zomebieland, and in Holy Rollers he now takes on the Promised Land. Playing a lapsed Hassidic Jew in 1998 Brooklyn, whose quest for gelt leads him to an Ecstasy-smuggling ring importing from Amsterdam, he gives a quietly conflicted performance that unfortunately never builds to create an understandable human being. Crime is bad. You will feel guilty. And if God doesn't get you, the police will. Any larger ideas about the relationship between the decadent and the divine get muddled in a well-constructed but ultimately unengaging story.
Based, uncredited, on the Sept. 30, 1999 article "Holy Rollers" by Ted B. Kissell in the South Florida alternative weekly
Miami New Times—which details the milieu and eventual arrests of Canadian-Israeli mastermind Sean Erez and the 18-year-old Hassidic Jews he recruited, Shimon Levita and Moshe Katz a.k.a. Simcha Roth, to help run his Ecstasy operation in New York City—the movie originated when self-described "nightlife maven" Danny A. Abeckaser read about the case, and decided he wanted to play the Erez role, here Jackie Solomon. He raised production money and hired indie producer-distributor Kevin Asch, who'd previously helmed a short, to direct the four-week feature, shot in New York and Amsterdam. Scripter Antonio Macia is a Mormon convert writing about Hassidim.
None of these facts bode auspiciously for
Holy Rollers, which at least can boast a straightforward narrative and a winning, grinning performance by Justin Bartha as Yosef Zimmerman, the criminal next-door who lures the disaffected Sam Gold (Eisenberg) into the fold. Initially semi-believing Josef's claim that they're just importing helpful medicine that red tape doesn't allow in the U.S., Sam—whose family just gets by and whose happy but hard-working father cares less about money than about his son becoming a rabbi—little by little gives in to the semi-fast life. That includes falling for Danny's girlfriend, Rachel Apfel (Ari Graynor, Agent Dunham's sister on TV's "Fringe"), based on the real-life Diana Reicherter, who for some reason was also called Rachel.
None of this becomes any more exciting than a night-school business class, and the internal conflicts are all blunt and didactic. And hard as Eisenberg tries, we get only the most superficial idea of who Sam is. With accents that may or may not be authentic but which come across like Jackie Mason stereotypes—Oy! If I hear da woid "gelt" one more time, I will plotz!—and uniformly dingy cinematography,
Holy Rollers hits a speed bump.
