![]() In other words, you get a story with a beginning, middle and end, characters who change through the course of the drama, and funny dialogue that shapes those characters - elements that are admittedly minimal, but that have become so rare that you experience "Brighton Beach Memoirs" like a prisoner taking his first walk as a free man. Or how someone may be shielded by the responsibilities assumed by an older brother. Or how the way parents treat two sisters - one pretty, one the workhorse - pursues them into middle age. You see how a weak man affects a willful woman, and how that woman's frustrations are visited upon her children. What you feel in "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is the psychological interchange of a family, long the richest vein of American playwrights, from O'Neill to Shepard. But as a play, "Brighton Beach" was avowedly an effort by Simon to get beyond mere jokiness and while those efforts here still seem tentative, the movie touches a level of emotion we all share. The Jerome family is Jewish, and much of the pleasure of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" comes from the way Simon mines specific Jewish types (like the martyred Jewish mother), and the effortless rat-a-tat of Borscht Belt wisecracks. And when Jack becomes ill, it only brings out the worst in Kate and Stanley (Brian Drillinger), Eugene's older brother. Eugene's mother Kate (Blythe Danner), filled with a bullying sort of love, endlessly nags, worries about and criticizes her brood his father Jack (Bob Dishy) is good natured but weak. In fact, Eugene dreams about all women, from the neighbor he spies on to the naked Africans in National Geographic, as Simon interweaves his lust as a running gag.īut laughter is not entirely what the Jerome household is about. But mostly, he dreams about his cousin Nora (Lisa Waltz), who along with her widowed mother Blanche (Judith Ivey), lives in the Jeromes' house. Eugene Jerome (Jonathan Silverman) dreams of becoming the center fielder for the New York Yankees or, failing that, a writer. ![]() And what makes it most powerful, perhaps, is the knowledge that the family is, at least in part, drawn from Simon's own.Īs meticulously recreated by production designer Stuart Wurtzel, the time and place of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is unmistakably Brooklyn, 1937. "Brighton Beach Memoirs" (written by Neil Simon from his hit play) is a regularly funny and at times affecting movie that captures, if not always successfully, the kind of back-and-forth of any ordinary family. Children under 13 should be accompanied by a parent ![]()
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