Jewtah (2018)

Jewtah (2018)

Directed by Cameron Bossert
Written by Jermy Rishe & Cameron Bossert

It is difficult to comment objectively on a movie that defies genre or standard categorization such as Jewtah. It plays with elements of madness, magic, spiritual entities, and ethnic background which leave a viewer to make of it what they can from what they bring with them to the experience. Broadly it is a comedy/drama of a young man’s coming of age and mature stability.

Pincus is a young Jewish man. He lives with his aging war-baby or early boomer grandmother and her partner in a beautiful middle class home in the suburbs of a Utah city. He was abandoned there at age 8 in the care of his granny by his parents who vanished to find themselves.
He retreats to his grandmother's basement in isolation for 13 years after being abused as a “Jew Boy!” by the blonde heartless Morman kids in the hood.

But grandma has to sell the house which is the set up of the crisis at the core of the movie.

Jeremy Rishe delivers a powerful and deeply convincing performance as Pincus. Since he is also the co-wirter of the picture it is easy to assume there are some autobiographical elements in the play.

What goes on? Madness, spiritual entity visitation, hallucination after 13 years of wandering in the basement desert of his own mind.
What can Pincus do to resolve his dilemma, if there is to be a resolution. Convert to LDS, or LSD? Discover the cure for everything and find reward? Get a PC and become an angry INCEL. (But then there remains the housing issue.) Move into a refrigerator box?
Win with special skills and entertainment like outsiders, George Burns, Sammy Davis, Aratha, Fanny Brice, Jack Benny, Irving Berlin, Franklin Pangborn, Liberace, and tour as a comic on the Utah Borscht Belt circuit. Buy an AK and visit the mall? Can he become a Jewish oddity museum display? (No threat in the land of Ol’Joe Smith.) Will he wander off beyond the bushes and live in Desert Solitude, start a personality cult? Can he latch on to a love to take his in out an affectionate pity? Flutter his big brown eyes and rely on The Kindness of Strangers?

He might do any or combination of the above but that would be telling.

Check out this interesting indie and find out.
It took a few days to decode Jewtah. (“Ah! That’s what it means? Duh!)

See it here offered by Third Wing Theater company which is doing innovative things with live theater and streaming media all very inexpensively.