Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer/director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It's one of those movies that gets bonus points for being "personal" -- it bops along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along.
Jenkins developed the script at the Sundance Institute after studying at the NYU film school and working as a performance artist. Set in the summer of 1976, it's about Murray Abramowitz (Alan Arkin), a divorced exile from the East Coast who moves with his three children into and out of cheapo rental apartments on the outskirts of Beverly Hills in an attempt to keep the kids in that school district. But Murray -- with his teenage daughter, Vivian (Natasha Lyonne), and two sons, Ben (David Krumholtz) and little Ricky (Eli Marienthal) -- shows little evidence of being enriched by anything remotely resembling education. That may be the point: Education is a convenient alibi for status-seeking.
Everybody in this film is outfitted with a cute eccentricity. Murray is fond of rousting his kids in the middle of the night and shunting them commando-style to the next crummy apartment slightly higher up the social ladder. His idea of a steak dinner is going to Sizzler. Ben is a wiseacre who seems to subsist on Trix breakfast cereal. He's like a standup comic in embryo -- he's always on. Ricky is his foil, but sometimes Ricky fights back, as in the scene where he pounds Ben for calling their dad (rightly) a senior citizen. It's the most touching sequence in the movie because it points up just how confused the boy is about having a father everybody keeps mistaking for his grandfather.
Jenkins wants Vivian to carry the show, and she does so by bringing out areas of female experience that we haven't quite seen before in a movie. One of the funniest recurring bits is the way Vivian's suddenly blossoming bustline becomes the centerpiece for family gawking. She feels like a freakazoid -- she's the star attraction in her own home. When her nutsy cousin Rita (Marisa Tomei) moves in, she introduces Vivian to vibrators and the joys of disreputability. Rita has just left rehab, and she means to rehabilitate Vivian in the ways of the world. In a family circle with no other women, Rita, of all people, becomes Vivian's role model.
Jenkins has a bemused way of looking at family combat, and her film is never less than enjoyable. The cast members, including Kevin Corrigan as a courtly, horny dope pusher, fit their roles to a T. But Jenkins's ambitions here are so slim that at times the movie seems to vaporize before our eyes. She's modest to a fault -- she doesn't do justice to her best ideas. What, for example, do the kids actually think about their father's status-climbing? The brood is made to seem oblivious to the Beverly Hills shimmer, but that doesn't ring true -- at least not for these kids. When we get a quick scene at the end with Rita's nouveaux riches parents, we perk up. The parents, after all, are played by those expert farceurs Rita Moreno and Carl Reiner. But they seem to exit the movie almost as quickly as they entered it. We get a lickety-split glimpse of what might have been. These actors know how to make gaudiness glow, and that's a glow this film truly needs.
Jenkins may be tiptoeing around an aspect of her movie that's too close for comfort. The upward mobility of Beverly Hills Jews is a ripe target for satire, but the film barely acknowledges it -- even though it's the core of the story. Was she afraid to make the film "too Jewish"? But the more "Jewish" Slums of Beverly Hills is, the better it is. When Jenkins tries to make everything generic and loopy, the film seems fake (as in a lot of Rita's scenes). Young filmmakers who bring the Italian-American experience to the movies are generally anything but shy about it. Why should the travails of upwardly mobile Jews -- even in this wafer-thin revue-sketch format -- be bleached by misplaced good taste? Jewish humor is about how people often are at their best -- their funniest and most vital -- when they are at their worst. Slums of Beverly Hills could use a shot of chutzpah.
Slums of Beverly Hills.
Rated R.
Directed by Tamara Jenkins. With Natasha Lyonne, Marisa Tomei, Alan Arkin and David Krumholtz.
