It'd be hard to imagine a riper or more overdue subject for satire than bar and bat mitzvahs, sacred Jewish rites of passage that have devolved over the years into excuses for grotesque displays of wealth and crass consumerism taken to comic extremes. In Keeping Up With The Steins, Cheryl Hines' manic bar-mitzvah coordinator specializes in playing to her clients' hubris and competitiveness with hilariously over-the-top spectacles that involve renting out Dodger Stadium and hiring DJ Quik as entertainment. In its terrific first half, Steins devastatingly but affectionately lampoons the arrogance and self-absorption of upwardly mobile Jews with dead-on bits like a preening rabbi (Richard Benjamin) who ducks into Hebrew-school classes just long enough to plug his book and forthcoming appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. Then the film takes a turn toward the soft and squishy and never fully recovers. Why? Blame veteran Hollywood filmmaker Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman), whose pandering, crowd-pleasing sensibility seems to have at least partially rubbed off on his son Scott.
The elder Marshall, always a better character actor than a director, co-stars as an affable aging hippie who travels to Southern California for his grandson's bar mitzvah, much to the anger and annoyance of estranged son Jeremy Piven, who never forgave the old man for abandoning his family. Will Piven and Marshall reconcile in time for the big bar mitzvah? Will Piven go through with a bar mitzvah that has nothing to do with his son's wishes and everything to do with his own bloated self-image? And will the film's satire survive its descent into gooey sentimentality?
What begins as a scathing but loving satire of materialism loses its way once it turns into a warmhearted after-school special about a nice young Jewish boy discovering the true meaning of the bar mitzvah. Cheeky irreverence gives way to reverence and a regrettable desire to defang the comedy for the sake of making a nice family movie. As befits a film with paternal conflict at its core, Marshall's initially sharp but increasingly ineffectual direction illustrates that having a prominent father can be a curse as well as a blessing.