Keeping Up With The Steins (2006)

Keeping Up With the Steins: Comedy. Starring Garry Marshall, Daryl
Sabara, Jami Gertz and Jeremy Piven. Directed by Scott Marshall.
(PG-13. 84 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Hidden in plain sight within "Keeping Up With the Steins," a spoof of
bar mitzvahs among the wealthy in Los Angeles, is a son's tribute to his
father. The spoof is middling, a collection of innocuous and mildly diverting
jokes, mercifully kept to a total of 84 minutes — most pictures have no
business being any longer than that. But the tribute to an aging parent is
moving and gives this routine comedy an extra something.

It hardly matters that the tribute is between the lines and has nothing
directly to do with the characters. On the surface, "Keeping Up With the
Steins" tells the story about the weeks leading up to a bar mitzvah, in the
competitive upper-class enclave of Brentwood. As the shy boy (Daryl Sabara)
looks toward the big day, he finds himself in the middle of tensions between
his straitlaced dad (Jeremy Piven) and his old hippie grandfather (Garry
Marshall), who abandoned his family years ago.

One might expect a farce from this setup, with both the father and the
grandfather treated with warm condescension. But Marshall, who plays the
grandfather, is the father of Scott Marshall, who directed the picture. And
gradually, Scott throws the film to Garry, lavishing time on scenes of grandpa
offering the grandson guidance and wisdom and showing loving tableaus of the
old man and the boy fishing or just walking together.

That this becomes effective, and doesn't come across as a director and his
father doing a tag-team on someone else's screenplay, can be credited to two
things. First, it doesn't seem conscious — or at least not obvious. The
treatment of the grandfather is loving, but dignified. The second is that Garry
Marshall is appealing enough to justify tilting a movie in his direction.
Indeed, this is the first time that the warmth, charm and self-possession that
Marshall displays in interviews have been captured on screen. He's a very
engaging guy.

Scott Marshall photographs his father in a way that talented, besotted
directors sometimes photograph their leading ladies, as if using the camera as
the mere excuse to do all the looking that would not be allowed in real life.
As always in movies, the goal is to understand the mystery and preserve the
surface, but in this case the mystery is a father's offbeat, casual grandeur,
and the surface being celebrated isn't fleeting beauty but an aging body. The
unalloyed affection with which the director films, in long shot, Marshall's
tall, slightly stooped frame — with a determination to hold this moment and
keep it — takes "Keeping Up With the Steins" just to the level where we can
begin to talk about it seriously.

The thing is, the affection that the director lavishes on his father is in
complete harmony with a story of family rapprochement. And while Scott
Marshall's emphasis on grandpa pushes dad off to the sidelines, the director's
sensitivity to father-son issues probably has something to do with the
intensity of Piven's performance. Piven plays an adult son's anger at his
deadbeat father with a heat and a truth unusual in a comedy. The director is
able to keep that and yet bring it into balance with the surrounding merriment.
And Jami Gertz, as the mother, is lovely, a grownup version of the Jewish girl
all us Italian boys were crazy about in high school.

Speaking of Italian and Jewish, it may come as a surprise that Garry
Marshall is not Jewish but Italian — his family is from Abruzzo. And he
doesn't try to act Jewish for the role — that's really him. Marshall just
happens to be a Jewish-seeming Italian, a sort of Harvey Keitel in reverse.

– Advisory: A naked old man as seen from behind. You've seen worse.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.