CROSSING DELANCEY
A film review by actnyc!jsb
Copyright 1989 actnyc!jsb
Well, I was looking forward to seeing CROSSING DELANCEY since everyone I know who saw it said they'd liked it. Supposedly, it was about how one falls in love despite rather than because of how you think it ought to be. Well, that's what MOONSTRUCK was about or at least what one of Nicholas Cage's speeches in MOONSTRUCK was about, and a good little speech it was, too. But CROSSING DELANCEY was not really about that at all. It was really about how deep down inside, every fish knows they really need a bicycle.
Okay, so here I am expecting to like this film and it starts out with Amy Irving's character Izzy (hmmm, a unisex name) in her exciting New York singles life with her literary crowd and her occasional overnight lay, with this old Jewish grandmother whom she loves but who doesn't really understand who she is. And Bubba (Yiddish affectionate term for grandma) arranges for Izzy to meet this nice Jewish man who sells pickles. (Hmmm, pickles.) I already know the plot. She's going to end up with the pickle man so what I want to see is how the film will pull it off. All the film has to do now is to get me to like this pickle guy and consider him superior to the literary types she hangs with.
Well, there are already things about the lit folks not to like. The usual faults: vanity, pretentiousness, manipulativeness, superficiality. They just know how to phrase things in an interesting manner. So we're halfway there. And we've got to overcome outdatedness, religiousness (which is, after all, outdated), drabness, uncoolness on Sam the pickle man's side. He has to become "substance" in contrast to the other folks "style." Well, his drabness can be shown to be self-assurance, i.e., he has no need to dramatize himself. His outdatedness can actually be respect for those outdated others in his community, e.g., he allows the matchmaker to believe that it was she who brought them together when actually he'd noticed Izzy two years earlier. His straight-forwardness is contrasted to the manipulations of the lit crowd and Izzy herself in her embodyment of their values.
But, for me any way, I never experience Sam as attractive. If only he would let slip that he could phrase things in an interesting manner too if he felt like it. In the Italian version, Nicholas Cage's character has an outrageousness and an energy which is attractive but Sam is just too G-rated to be exciting without some unique characteristic to make him stand out. But that's part of the message of this film. Bubba admits the man she'd married wasn't special, just persistent but that showed how much he loved her and that that was the basis of her marriage's (and therefore all marriage's) success. Attractiveness is just style, persistence is substance.
And what does Sam see in Izzy? His first attraction is to her looks. And all that he gets to see of her in the following several scenes is how good she looks and how badly she treats him. So Sam gets to chase style and ignore substance. Well, he's got enough substance for both of them. So I'm left feeling that, since her life is incomplete without a man (and we are continuously and subtly shown evidence that this is so, only she's too modern to admit it to herself) and Sam is a nice man (since he puts up with her mistreatment of him) she is right to end up with him. She doesn't understand why she is attracted to him and acts as if she is drawn to him against her will. I don't understand why she is attracted to him either and experienced the "against her will" part not as a surrender to a deeper self within her, but as a surrender to the traditional solution for what every women really needs.
jim (uunet!actnyc!jsb)
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