Brighton Beach Memoirs

One of my favorite movies. Great cast, lead by Jonathan Silverman and Blythe Danner. Serious drama situations with brilliant comedic punches. An exact mixture of character and story. Real people with real problems, and everyone has a different relationship with each family member. Sensitively moves from slightly-sad to hilariously-funny. Read the quotes. This is the best adaptation of a Neil Simon play.

If you wanna see more of Eugene check Biloxi Blues (starring Matthew Broderick who played in both stage versions) is OK, a bit on a darker side. Get away from the made-for-TV Broadway Bound.

This is a gently amusing coming-of-age comedy that comes from the later, more mature period of Neil Simon's writing. Although there are plenty of wisecracks to go around, this is not one of those Neil Simon pieces where every character spouts out one-liner jokes for 2 hours like they're guest stars on a Bob Hope special. There are also dramatic elements (some work, some are overkill) that lend some weight to the story.

The performances are good across the board, especially Blythe Danner as the mother (although she and Judith Ivey were oddly WASP-ish choices to play Jewish women). I've never been a fan of Jonathan Silverman, but I will say that he hits the right notes as the obnoxious, gawky, and totally horned-up teen-age narrator/protagonist of the story.

The movie is very similar in tone to Woody Allen's "Radio Days," but the latter is far more imaginative and funny than this one.

With the exception of the miscasting of Danner, this adaptation of Neil Simon's autobiographical play is well transfered to film with Silverman taking over where Matthew Broderick left off on the Broadway stage. Silverman stars as Eugene Morris Jerome, a 15 year old aspiring to be a writer with only two things on his mind - baseball and sex. The film captures the essence of Simon's upbringing with a comedic look at the trials and tribulations of growing up in a crowded Jewish household. Dishy is wonderful as the father. Keep an eye out for a young Jason Alexander as a pool shark.

Whether the actors are really Jewish or not, these are some of the most forced Brooklyn/Jewish accents in Hollywood history. The way they spread the schmaltz around it's downright unbearable. Blythe Danner in an unbelievably poor piece of casting, lumbers her way through the part of the Jewish mother like a shiksa doing the horah. The mess of bad interpretations is practically racist. It made it impossible for me to stick with it. Oy gevalt! Avoid this piece of work at all cost. On the other hand if the play comes around to your local theater, go see it--there it works! Neil Simon always works best in live theater anyway, Yep, that's it.

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS was the first of a trilogy of plays that Neil Simon wrote about his own life, renaming himself Eugene Morris Jerome. This play was a Broadway smash and made a star and Tony Award winner out of Matthew Broderick. When it was time to bring the play to the screen, Broderick was unavailable because he was back on Broadway in the second play of the trilogy, BILOXI BLUES, so Jonathan Silverman was pegged to star in the film version as Eugene, the slightly neurotic teen going through puberty and other realities of being a Jewish teen during WWII with the help of his loving family. Silverman makes a suitable replacement for Broderick and seems quite at ease speaking directly to the camera. I'm one of the few who really liked Blythe Danner as his strong willed mother...maybe the accent was a bit much, but Danner infuses the character with warmth and strength and Bob Dishy has one of his best roles as Eugene's father, a quiet tower of strength whose world weariness never allows him to neglect his family. Judith Ivey plays Danner's sister, a lonely woman whose lack of self-esteem seems to have stemmed from feeling she has lived in her sister's shadow her whole life and Brian Drillinger also scores as Stanley, Eugene's older brother, who loses his paycheck gambling and then loses his job and doesn't know how to tell Mom and Dad. Gene Saks directs with a loving, if loose hand and the film could have been more tightly paced, but the performances of Silverman, Danner, and Dishy made it worth my time.