Movie Review – Crossing Delancey

Crossing Delancey (1988) Izzy(Amy Irving) is a bright and talented young woman working at a low paying job that she loves coordinating events at a small independent bookstore in New York City.  She thinks her life is ideal but her grandmother begs to differ.  With a little help from the marriage broker a date is set up between Izzy and Sam (Peter Reigert).  Sam runs the family pickle business and Izzy doesn’t see him as the man of her dreams.  Instead she’s focused on a self centered local author and the life she thinks she “ought” to be living.  Modern life meets traditional Jewish culture in a charming romantic comedy.

I have loved this movie from the first instant I saw it.  When I finished watching “Marty” (review last week) I immediately thought of the parallels between the two.  Strong ethnic story lines, family pressure to marry, counter pressures from other sources and ultimately the conflict between who we are and who we think we ought to be.  The two movies also share a deep well of humanity in their story telling, a warm heart at the center of it all.

What “Marty” lacks is a character like Izzy’s Bubbie.  Played to perfection by career Yiddish theater actress Reizl Boyzik, she steals any scene she’s in.  Which is perfect, because Bubbie is the center of any scene she’s in too.  Between the script and Reigert’s work Sam is also letter perfect.  He never slides into caricature or let’s Sam become one dimensional.  It would be easy to let that character just slide by but the movie doesn’t let it happen.  Irving also brings a perfectly believable Izzy to the screen.  One who is going through the motions to please Bubbie at first but slowly sees the real man in Sam rather than the slick writer.  It’s interesting that Irving gets star billing but is only (in my opinion) the third best actor in the cast.

I won’t tell you this is a great movie.  The script has several completely pointless characters and scenes in it.  Adapted from a stage play I wonder if Susan Sandler who wrote both the play and the screenplay loved them so much she couldn’t bring herself to cut them.  There’s an unexamined “friend with benefits” character who lives upstairs from Izzy who is expendable (except you’d lose one of Reigert’s best lines), a rather extended scene of a bris ceremony that adds little and a sauna scene that offers nothing other than a glimpse of Irving’s breasts.  The movie would have been even better if she had.  One character gets a big buildup (Marilyn, played by Suzzy Roche of the Roches) then just disappears.  The good news is that what’s good in the script (Izzy, Sam and Bubbie) is good enough that you won’t care too much about what’s not so good.

I talk about this movie a lot when I want to talk about “little movies”, movies with smaller budgets that are closely focused on story and character.  It’s been a few years since I last saw “Crossing Delancey” and I was afraid that I’d built it up too much in memory.

Instead I was rewarded with the same joy I remembered.  One of my personal favorites.

Rating – ***** Highly Recommended