Friday, February 18, 1994

Take 2. Friday’s Guide to Movies & Music. Movie review.

WACKY WIT PUTS ‘LEON’ IN THE PYTHON MODE
Johanna Steinmetz

Political correctness may have wiped out ethnic comedy in this country, but for those who still can laugh at cultural clashes, there is “Leon the Pig Farmer” from England, sort of a “Monty Python Goes Kosher.”

“Leon,” with an impressive cast and a script commissioned by Python’s Eric Idle, takes an old and serviceable fantasy-what if your parents (and therefore your heritage) turned out not to be your parents?-and gives it enough oddball turns to make it fresh and vastly amusing.

Leon of the title is a young London man who is smothered by life, by his Orthodox Jewish family and its expectations, by the savage opportunism of his work in real estate, by the guilt that has him imagining that perfect strangers kibitz on his most intimate details.

A woman he loves, who is Jewish, tells him she prefers her men to be adventurous (“boxers, tree surgeons”), which he is not. A woman he doesn’t love, who isn’t Jewish, is eager to seduce him upon learning he is. (“Daddy hates Jews,” she croons in ecstacy.)

His distorted psyche, expressed on film by tight camera angles and a deadpan acceptance of the peculiar, is about to implode when he discovers that his biological father is not Sydney Geller, a London draper, but Brian Chadwick, a Yorkshire pig farmer. He heads to Yorkshire, where the warmth of the Chadwicks’ greeting and his culturally inherited aversion to pigs put him once more in conflict, but also on the road to self-discovery.

Under the co-direction of young filmmakers Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor, “Leon” occasionally belabors its own wit and ethnic self-consciousness. But, over all, with its unlikely combination of wackiness and Borscht Belt gags, it’s the sprightliest comedy to come here from England since “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Although most of its humor is derived from the situation of being Jewish, the film is just as funny skewering WASPs. The Chadwicks, for example, are introduced as one big, happy, multiply divorced family.

The film’s later scenes are

Local filmgoers will have to make an effort to see “Leon the Pig Farmer,” whose screening schedule makes it as elusive as an endangered species. It is being shown three times at the Film Center of the Art Institute and twice at the Skokie Theater.

“LEON THE PIG FARMER” ***

redeeming Jewish humor, does not conspicuously raise the success level. It begins when Mark Frankel’s sweet, gawky Leon Geller is blasted out of his cozy North London orbit by the news that he is a test-tube baby. Not only that. It seems there was a mix-up. Instead of being the issue of the accumulated sperm of the man he has known as his father, it seems his biological father was a Yorkshire pig farmer named Brian Chadwick of Lower Dinthorpe.

Leon was in enough trouble to begin with, having just resigned his real estate job rather than vandalize Charles Dickens’ house by buying it as the centerpiece of a leisure complex, and getting less than nowhere with the cute girl next door, who finds him dull. He becomes even duller in her eyes by going to work for his mother’s catering business. He meets an exciting woman (played by Maryam D’Abo, who seems best attuned to the high farcial attack the material demands) who specializes in stained glass Crucifixion portraits, adores him because he’s Jewish and her father hates Jews, and pops him up on a cross to pose for her. But soon he finds himself hiding another secret. His father runs a net curtain business and, window-conscious creature that she is, she hates net curtains.

Buckling under the mounting stress level, Leon bolts for Yorkshire, suffering from an identity crisis and determined to meet his real father. To his surprise, the Yorkshire family greets him warmly and starts turning Jewish as fast as they can, with the aid of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “The Joys of Yiddish.” What should be the big comic set piece, when Leon’s two families meet and each behaves as they think the other would, is painfully flat, though. And the film’s big crossbreeding metaphor backfires.

When Leon accidentally inseminates a pig with a hypodermic full of sheep semen, resulting in a half-pig, half-sheep, we’re grateful we only hear it bleating and snorting and never have to see it. Is it kosher? That’s the big issue as Conservative and Reform rabbis travel out to the countryside to give a look and decide. Certainly it can’t be any more ungainly than the direction and the script, which seem dedicated to proving once and for all that livestock and identity crises don’t mix. Better the film should have stuck with the Jewish humor, as when character wonder aloud why the kosher laws banned shellfish. “How often did the Jews find lobster in the desert?” he asks, like an Old Testament Neil Simon. Even when it isn’t fresh, the Jewish humor is fresh, which is more than can be said for the tepid absurdism of “Leon the Pig Farmer.”