Holy Rollers

HOLY ROLLERS

Directed by Kevin Asch

Runtime: 89 min.

Approaching the offense of Maria Full of Grace, where Christian metaphor was used to elevate the intrigue of drug smuggling and immigration, Holy Rollers avoids ethnic insult by distancing its crime plot from its characters’ religious values. Sammy Gold (Jesse Eisenberg) studies to become a rabbi until a Brooklyn neighbor breaks with Orthodoxy and lures him into a plan to smuggle Ecstasy pills from Amsterdam into the U.S. The story of Sammy’s innocent attraction to the unholy life reinforces his religious longing. It’s serious where Maria Full of Grace was full of crap.

A rabbi cautions Sammy: “Be careful, the imagination is very dangerous.” That warning evokes the hilarious frustrations of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man—which may turn out to be their finest film because, like Holy Rollers, it explored essential aspects of personal and social identity. The depth of Sammy’s troubles (supposedly based on a real 1999 FBI case) reflect genuine existential dilemma. Director Kevin Asch and writer Antonio Macia keep the story anecdotal but the ethnic details are so complex, intense and authentic, their meanings expand. Excited about his globetrotting escapades, Sammy enthuses to his jaded partners: “Amsterdam used to be called New Jerusalem and New York used to be called New Amsterdam!” His zeal is countered with a ruthless declaration of power and shame from Sammy’s religious teaching that rocks his naiveté.

Two special moments—blond Rachel (Ari Graynor) gives Sammy ecstasy and asks him to run away with her, and an Orthodox proselytizer stops him to perform a mitzvah on the street—are made beautiful by Eisenberg’s guileless youth. He wants to be seduced and he wants to be holy. His personal re-examination of what it means to be Jewish is genuinely conflicted—not the P.C. condescension of Maria Full of Sap. In this way, Holy Rollers suggests a long-overdue version of Philip Roth’s great 1959 short story “Defender of the Faith.” Asch’s narrative, like Roth’s, focuses on what’s important. Pondering how, “Every man must know where he stands in relation to Hashem’s presence,” Asch doesn’t show the Coens’ wit or aesthetic rigor but he underscores their gravity. Holy Rollers may only be a footnote to A Serious Man, but when Sammy cuts off his payess, looks at himself in a cracked mirror, or looks desperately up to heaven, it’s a footnote in boldface.