by michael fox
correspondent
The Argentinean lawyer Perelman Sr., introduced to us by Perelman Jr. at the beginning of “Family Law,” is the ultimate people person.
His friendships with secretaries and clerks in every courtroom and department, molded over the years with affectionate patter and small birthday gifts, allow him to skip the lines everyone else must endure. His rural and working-class clients are uncomfortable in big-city offices, so he meets them in cafeterias.
Perelman Jr. admires this street-level approach to the practice of law only up to a point. Although he was inspired to become an attorney himself, he chose to teach law instead of working in his father’s office.
Running a classroom fits the younger Perelman, for though he is sociable he is also faintly aloof, lacking his father’s warmth and openness. He may be married with a young son, yet Perelman Jr. is oddly distanced from his life.
“Family Law” starts out as a jaunty comedy, and gradually, infinitesimally, deepens into a portrait of Perelman Jr.’s aimlessness and hazy dissatisfaction. The film, which opens Friday, Feb. 23, is an unusual coming-of-age story in that the protagonist is in his 30s.
Writer-director Daniel Burman is more interested in details than incidents, and yet the film isn’t exactly an intimate character study. Perelman Jr. remains vaguely out of reach, perhaps because he can’t get a handle on his own feelings.
From a dramatic standpoint, the movie seems to be continually setting us up for a major development or shift. Its inevitable arrival is so late and understated, however, that it’s less profound than anticlimactic.
As with writer-director Daniel Burman’s previous films, starring Daniel Hendler, the protagonist’s Jewish identity is front and center, though this time it’s a non-issue.
Perelman Jr. is an assimilated guy who, nonetheless, is familiar with recent Jewish history. He objects to his son’s enrollment in a Swiss kindergarten, somewhat humorously, by trying to remind his wife about Switzerland’s role in World War II. (She cuts him off, but most moviegoers will know he’s referencing the Jews turned away at the Swiss border, and the decades of postwar stonewalling about bank accounts belonging to Jews who died in the Holocaust.)
Perelman Jr. fancies himself an ethical man who enjoys challenging his students on the theoretical difference between not tossing a life vest to a drowning man and pushing said vest out of the reach of said man. He evinces skepticism at some of his father’s techniques, such as hiring and coaching a professional witness to provide false testimony on behalf of his clients.
Yet the relationship between son and father, which is ultimately more central to the movie than that between son and wife, is one of low-key self-respect. Admittedly, that is closer to real life and truer to the experience of most adult sons. But it also means that the film percolates on a low, steady flame, and never heats up.
Indeed, our empathy for Perelman Jr. and our concern for what happens to him derive less from Burman’s script and direction than Hendler’s charisma and easygoing charm. At the same time, his nebulous character is overshadowed by the skilled, assured Perelman Sr. (played by Arturo Goetz) in every scene they share.
In other words, “Family Law,” which is Argentina’s official submission for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, focuses on the wrong Perelman.
“Family Law” opens Friday, Feb. 23 at the Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California