Crossing Delancey (1988)

Directed by Joan Micklin Silver. Starring Amy Irving, Peter Riegert, Reizl Bozyk, Jeroen Krabbé, Sylvia Miles, John Bedford Lloyd, George Martin, Marilyn Cohen, David Hyde Pierce, Claudia Silver, Rosemary Harris, Suzzy Roche, Amy Wright. [PG]

In stereotypical fashion, an elderly, Yiddish Lower East Side woman doesn’t understand why her pretty and intelligent granddaughter (Irving) can’t find a good man, so she consults a matchmaker, who sets the young woman up with a gentle, sensitive pickle salesman (Riegert). Irving, however, dislikes such old-fashioned traditions and rejects the “pickle man” because she’s interested in a more sophisticated, worldly sort of gent, such as the caddish author (Krabbé) on whom she has designs. Romantic comedy is smartly cast, specifies its crowd/types—who may find more relatable truth than familiar cliché in the character behavior—and prefers warmth and wit to set pieces and belly laughs. Aside from a couple of scenes (e.g., a turbulent ride from an “amateur” Jamaican cab driver), it’s refreshingly low-key, too, but the screenplay is still a slave to formula, and the path is as obvious as the destination. The lone motion picture performance from star of Yiddish theater, Reizl Bozyk; she plays the heroine’s bubbe.

64/100