Inauspiciously billed as a life-affirming descendant of “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Full Monty,” “Reuniting the Rubins” proves as drearily formulaic as the weakest of those films’ myriad imitations. Yoav Factor’s first feature stars Timothy Spall as the bumbling patriarch of an English Jewish family whose sparring children resist coming together for a Passover seder. Theoretical laughter, tears and maudlin contrivance ensue. Opening on two Los Angeles screens March 23, pic should make a fast exit to home formats.
Widowed Danny (Spall) is about to embark on a solo cruise vacation when he’s yanked back to shore by his imperious mother (Honor Blackman). Feeling her life is drawing to a close, she insists her grandchildren be gathered for a seder, and has even repurchased the well-heeled family’s original country manse for that purpose. “They’re just too different!” Danny whines before dutifully setting off to woo each grown child back home.
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Danny (James Callis) is a ruthless corporate capitalist with OCD who doesn’t shrink from exploiting Third World labor but has little time for the son (a gratingly precocious Theo Stevenson) whose mother he divorced. His opposite is Andie (Rhona Mitra), an all-purpose activist fighting oppression in some embattled African nation. Yona, nee Jonathan (Hugh O’Conor), is an Orthodox rabbi and yeshiva teacher in Jerusalem, with two kids already and a third on the way. Last and least (in terms of screentime) is Clarity, aka Charlie (Asier Newman), a Buddhist monk who has pilgrim-visitors weirdly treating him like some sort of human crystal ball. (Maybe Newman’s part got short shrift because the editors realized his was the most off-target among all the stereotypes on display.)
Childhood rows and wildly clashing adult values have rendered them all long incommunicado, with each other if not with Dad. Reunion results in a great deal of yelling, culminating in supposedly hilarious living-room fisticuffs, at which point, naturally, a sobering event occurs to make everyone forget their petty grievances. Factor isn’t content with just one cliched crisis, however: Four pile up in the pic’s last lap, which only lacks an insert shot of Jerry Lewis weeping grateful tears. Amid all this domestic bathos, global-minded Andie utters the immortal line, “Danny, I need you to call off the junta!”
Its humor and sentimentality equally labored, this by-the-numbers pic (which preemed in London nearly two years ago) will look better, albeit still not good, as a latenight cable or streaming time-killer. Thesps do what they can; tech/design elements are pro.
