31 Candles opens with a flashback to an AOL chat between the protagonist, Leo (writer, director, and star Jonah Feingold), and his crush in summer camp, Eva (Sarah Coffey).
This volley of keystrokes suggests that Leo was in love and that Eva was affectionate and indifferent. This does well in teeing off the plot, instantly making us wonder what might become of them and their romantic prospects years later.
There is a ton of stuff to admire here, and the temptation is to immediately single out Feingold for a truckload of praise, given the work he shouldered into this production as star, writer, and director. But the truth is, everyone here plays things perfectly, turning out a well-cast, clever, micro-budget New York comedy that is a cute and superior running mate to the Hallmark holiday films it comments on.
You see, good Jewish boy Leo churns out endless inter-racial Christmas movies, making him sort of resemble a milquetoast Greg Lansky. This career amuses his Jewish contemporaries, and he is urged throughout to do proper work, but he seems happy to defend and plough his peculiar furrow – “Christmas Kiss has like a 4.2 on Letterboxd, that’s awesome,” he pleads. It’s sharp little lines like this that shine throughout (Doesn’t 4.2 mark roughly where to worry about reviews on massaged media?)
So, present-day Leo feels steeped in romance at work, but he endlessly dates freakbats he feels nothing for at night, so when he hears Eva is back on the scene, the nostalgia of his early crush comes back to obsess him.
However, their first meeting in years reveals a brilliant little problem: he’s always been diminutive, and there was a year when “I grew on the inside, and she grew on the outside.” So when they are reintroduced at a friend’s apartment, shaking hands while Coffey’s 6’1” form looms through a doorway, it’s like a shot from Avatar; Leo shrinking further in horror at the light of his life becoming a street lamp.
“…Leo decides to stage an embrace of his faith and have his missed Bar Mitzvah at 31 years of age…”
Coffey plays Eva perfectly, pretty and insouciant about any lack of luck as an actress. She is fulfilled handsomely by her day job tutoring children for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and that’s where the film gets its title; just days after discovering his first gray hair, Leo decides to stage an embrace of his faith and have his missed Bar Mitzvah at 31 years of age, mainly so he can make moves on Eva, “The One.”
Which means he is suddenly something of a stranger in a strange land. “I can’t imagine they’d have to re-circumcise me. But you never know,” he muses to a friend’s question as he begins his odyssey, chasing Eva while discovering an old, lost station in his development.
“My parents thought that their divorce was more important than my manhood,” he tells her, gatecrashing her class to sit with a couple of young kids who are mystified but accepting of his presence.
This is a professional-looking New York romantic comedy, using the parks and streets well as a backdrop to comedy and romance. Although New York is New York and not Paris in the sixties, where Godard’s guerrilla manoeuvres happily ignore looks into the camera from untutored Parisians, New York’s street life is less appealing, undercutting the romance. It doesn’t exactly vibrate with the joys of a spring meadow. But otherwise, the locations in a crisp and golden autumn look good, adding class in spades and opening the film up nicely.
Leo’s journey is handled perfectly. Feingold is a star; cute as a button and funny as hell. As writer and director, he obviously serves himself well, with a wealth of good lines and some good opportunities for exquisite physical comedy (like when he tries to cross a street casually and becomes a slow-mo explosion of indecision). It’s all very agreeable, filled to the brim with talent, and staged with real skill.
"…I can't imagine they’d have to re-circumcise me. But you never know..."
