Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
Eugene, a young teenage Jewish boy, recalls his memoirs of his time as an adolescent youth. He lives with his parents, his aunt, two cousins, and his brother, Stanley, whom he looks up to and admires. He goes through the hardships of puberty, sexual fantasy, and living the life of a poor boy in a crowded house.
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The Worst Film Ever
Such a frustrating disappointment
Blistering performances.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
If you want to see an almost perfect demonstration of the proposition that film is a directors's medium, BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS is the movie to see. The performances are uniformly dreadful, leading the viewer to conclude that, without decent direction, actors are largely incompetent. And, in addition to his overall ineptness, Gene Saks , the director, has such a tin ear that he allows his actors to speak in accents incomprehensible as the Yiddish-inflected New Yorkese that presumably was intended. Furthermore, the audience is invited to believe that this story is something of a transcription of Neil Simon's boyhood experiences. We therefore are asked to accept that this tale is a reasonable approximation of the attitudes and values of a first-generation working-class Jewish family of the 1930s. Yet one of the key elements of the narrative presents a situation that is virtually unbelievable, which is that the family accepts and even encourages the prospect of a serious relationship between one of its members and an alcoholic Irish Catholic. It's also doubtful that the suitor's mother would have viewed her son's interest in a Jewish widow with the equanimity her character displays, but that just demonstrates Simon's cluelessness about a world beyond his own. But what's his excuse for such egregious ignorance of the one he purports to be representing? Either he doesn't really understand the culture he's writing about, or he's distorting it to advance his plot. Neither works to the story's advantage, and either option undermines the integrity of the narrative .
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.
I starred as Eugene Morris Jerome in my high school adaptation of the play and this film definitely doesn't live up to the script or the imagination of Neil Simon. I know this play backwards and forwards and I can honestly tell you that the acting was off, The production was cheesy. The changes in the play's script were poorly done. If you want to really enjoy this play you should see the actual play, not a Hollywood movie adaptation. The Eugene character lacked soul and was overly sarcastic in all he said. The other characters were off key as well. A general disappointment, messy, disloyal to the play, amateurishly executed!
This is without a doubt one of Neil Simon's best plays turned movies. It's full of great characters, and memorable dialog. Johnathan Silverman makes a great screen version of young Eugene(he was played by Matthew Broderick on stage).This is the first of Simon's autobiographical trilogy, its followed by the wonderful "Biloxi Blues", and closes with the TV movie "Broadway Bound". If I had to say the movie has any flaws it would maybe be that characters sometimes usually speak in obvious dialog, but that's alright because it's great dialog. Rent this little gem, you won't be sorry!