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'When Do We Eat?': A Passover feast of clichés

Just in time for Passover, and a year after it opened the Palm Beach International Film Festival, comes a rerun farcical look at seder rituals that asks the burning question on every Jewish family member's lips, When Do We Eat?

Trafficking in broad caricatures and ethnic stereotypes, director/co-writer Salvador Litvak's scattershot approach to poking fun virtually assures something to amuse and offend everyone. Although he ties the film up with a spiritual message, Litvak spends most of the movie in sitcom mode.

ThinkFilm 'When Do We Eat?' C The verdict: Ethnic stereotypes abound in a broad Passover farce. Director: Salvador Litvak Starring: Ben Feldman, Michael Lerner, Mili Avital, Jack Klugman, Lesley Ann Warren Run time: 90 minutes Release date: April 7, 2006 Rating: R for drug use, language and some sexual content. On the web Official movie site [an error occurred while processing this directive]

During the course of an evening's Passover meal, we meet the Stuckmans, a secular Jewish clan whose patriarch, Ira (Michael Lerner), makes his living selling Christmas ornaments. When it comes to Passover, the celebration of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, Ira prides himself on running "the world's fastest seder." After all, speed is of the essence so that the Stuckmans will not have time to let all their internecine squabbling surface.

A miscast Leslie Ann Warren is Ira's wife, Peggy, eager to assemble the family peaceably, however unlikely that would be. She plans an elaborate seder under a backyard tent erected by Rafi, an Israeli with a Moshe Dayan eye patch, for whom she has the hots.

A year ago, elder son Ethan was flying high with a business deal, but the venture went bust and he shows up now as a bearded, black-clad devout Hassid, scolding the rest of the family for its cavalier view of religion. Shades of Moliere, though, the most religious character is also the biggest hypocrite, as Ethan succumbs that evening to the temptations of the flesh with his cousin Vanessa.

Enterprising daughter Nikki is a sexual surrogate, a job the rest of the family cannot quite distinguish from hooker. Lesbian daughter Jennifer works in television, typing subtitles for combative talk shows. And Zeke is the neglected son whose cry for attention is slipping a tab of Ecstasy into his father's Alka-Seltzer.

Add in Holocaust-obsessed grandpa Artur (a shriveled Jack Klugman) and you have enough eccentric characters to churn up the Red Sea. There could well be an interesting intersection of all these colorful types, but Litvak is content to whip them into a frenzy of yelling, screaming and wrestling at the seder table at regular intervals.

On what is clearly a low budget, Litvak does get a fairly attractive look to his film, even if it does take place chiefly around the seder table. If he had any money left in the budget, he might have sprung for a script doctor, to weed out some of the clichés in When Do We Eat?