Brighton Beach Memoirs movie review (1986)

But most of the difference, I think, is in the direction.

The movie was directed by Gene Saks, who directs many of Simon's plays on both the stage and the screen, and whose gift is for the theater. His plays have the breath of life; his movies feel like the official authorized version. Everything is by the numbers. After we learn that the hero's family always pronounces diseases with a whisper, we know with total certainty that at least one whispered disease will be "diarrhea," and that the joke will be carried on for one disease too long.

In "Brighton Beach Memoirs," the first in an autobiographical trilogy by Simon, he remembers his early adolescence. Still ahead were the uncertain war years of "Biloxi Blues" and the family wars and heartbreaks of "Broadway Bound," his current stage success. Simon tells his story through the eyes of Eugene (Silverman), a kid who seems more like a future go-fer than a future playwright, and whose life is consumed by a great and solemn desire to see at least one naked girl.

Eugene lives in a home filled with relatives; not only his parents and an important older brother, but also an aunt and a cousin. In the stage version, I could feel the crowding, the way the overlapping lives within the house raised the family's collective temperature. In the movie, there's no sense of other lives being lived through the walls, and the characters seem to walk on for their assigned material and then evaporate.

Nor does the Brighton Beach neighborhood really come to life, despite untold effort spent to dress the street where Jonathan lives.

When he leaves home, it's usually to go to Greenblatt's grocery, where his mother sends him several times a day (another standing joke). On his way there and back, he never seems to encounter anyone except characters specifically involved with the plot. This isn't a Brooklyn teeming with life and excitement; it's a backdrop for schtick.

Sometimes the family feels like backdrop, too. Jonathan's mother is intended to be one of the great towering figures of his life, but Blythe Danner doesn't bring much force to the character. Danner proved in "The Great Santini" that she can bring great passion to the role of the mother of a troubled family, but in this movie there seems to be an invisible line she's not allowed to cross, a certain level above which she must not raise her voice. There's that feeling all through the movie - the feeling that a safe middle ground has been established, and that nothing will grow too fearsome, too passionate or too angry.