29
Apr/16

DOUGH

29
Apr/16
DOUGH

Ayyash (Jerome Holder) learns how to make challah from master baker Nat Dayan (Jonathan Pryce) in DOUGH

DOUGH (John Goldschmidt, 2016)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, April 29
212-529-6799
www.menemshafilms.com
www.villageeastcinema.com

John Goldschmidt’s Dough is a sweet-natured, goodhearted buddy movie that can’t quite escape its leavened story, never quite rising to its potential. (Pardon the puns, but the film opens in New York City during Passover, when observant Jews cannot eat bread products made with yeast.) The great Jonathan Pryce stars as Nat Dayan, a kosher baker in London’s East End who specializes in bagels, challah, and muffins for a devoted but dwindling clientele. When a large chain supermarket moves in next door, ruthless developer Sam Cotton (Philip Davis) hires away Nat’s assistant in a direct attempt to force him out of business. Desperately seeking a new employee — and regularly expressing disappointment that his son, Stephen (Daniel Caltigirone), chose a law career over the family legacy — Nat agrees to hire Ayyash (Jerome Holder), the teenage son of his cleaning woman, Darfur refugee Safa (Natasha Gordon). Ayyash is a low-level drug dealer trying to make a good impression on Victor (Ian Hart), the brutal, violent local drug kingpin. The white and Jewish Nat and the black and Muslim Ayyash mix like, well, oil and water at first as the former teaches the latter how to bake, but when Ayyash accidentally drops some pot into the dough mixer, customers go crazy for the resulting challah, giving renewed energy to Nat and his customers. Meanwhile, the old curmudgeon is being courted by the recently widowed Joanna Silverman (Pauline Collins), the bakery’s landlady.

Pryce (Brazil, Miss Saigon), who is not Jewish but can be seen in New York City this July playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at Lincoln Center, is a joy to watch, balancing a lovely gentleness with a gruff edge, and Holder makes a fine film debut as Nat’s unexpected apprentice, but the rest of the cast has to play cardboard characters who are either purely good or purely bad, involved in clichéd situations and TV-sitcom twists. Goldschmidt (Maschenka, She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas), a TV-movie veteran who hasn’t directed a feature film since the mid-1980s, and first-time screenwriters Yehudah Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson try to capture the charm of such film favorites as Local Hero, Waking Ned Divine, and The Full Monty, with occasional success, but they also leave several gaping plot holes, including a major one that is never addressed as the bakery’s wares get nearly everyone, including children, high as kites. Even the well-developed relationship between Nat and Ayyash, which includes a compelling moment when they both pray in the bakery, the former putting on tefillin, the latter bowing down to Mecca on a small carpet, goes awry in the end. There’s still a lot to enjoy in Dough, but the individual delights don’t add up to a successful whole, with too much soggy matzoh and not enough bite.