arts & entertainment
Sleeping With The Fishes
Mother-daughter relationship prevails
in Jewish-Latina comedy.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
E
stella Fish is Puerto Rican, and she
clasps a rosary while fretting about
her directionless youngest daughter,
Alexis. Yet she sounds like a typical Jewish
mother concerned about an underachieving
adult child.
It may have something to do with the fact
that Estella's husband is Jewish — although
he's easygoing and soft-spoken rather than
full of shtick. The truth, though, is she
embodies the universal instincts of mothers
everywhere — and reminds viewers of their
own morn.
New York writer-director Nicole Gomez
Fisher modeled Estella on her own mother
for the altogether-winning indie comedy
Sleeping with the Fishes. For her first screen-
play, Fisher followed the age-old advice to
write what you know.
"The characters are all loosely based on
my family," she confides in a phone inter-
view.
"The actual story itself is a mix of fiction
and truth. It is based on my upbringing of
being a Puerto Rican Jew, my mother being
Puerto Rican and, when she met my father,
her choice to convert to Judaism. So we were
raised Jewish, and for the most part we went
to Sunday school and Hebrew school."
Sleeping with the Fishes presents a color-
blind New York in which young people pay
no attention to ethnicity, race and religion.
Fisher's childhood was a lot more compli-
cated, however.
Jews
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
At The Movies
Opening Friday, Oct.17, are the follow-
ing films:
St. Vincent, a comedy-drama, seems
tailor-made for Bill Murray's talents.
Vincent (Murray) is an acerbic, heavy-
drinking gambler who lives a pretty
bare existence in a section of Brooklyn
that is still dominated by second- and
third-generation Jews, Italians and
Irish who are less than rich.
Vincent's social life revolves around
a stripper (Naomi Watts), who he
pays to sleep with him. Then, Maggie
(Melissa McCarthy), an X-ray tech who
has just broken up with her husband,
moves in next door with her 12-year-
old son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher).
Maggie enrolls Oliver in a nearby
Catholic school despite the fact that
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October 16 • 2014
JN
"It was a weird upbringing in the sense
that my sister and I tended not to be
accepted by kids in Hebrew school," she
recalls. "They would say things like, 'You
know, you're technically not a Jew' or 'You
don't celebrate this [holiday]' or 'You're not
kosher: They put labels on us and made us
feel very excluded."
Sleeping with the Fishes premiered last
year at the Brooklyn Film Festival. It's airing
numerous times in October and November
on various HBO networks and comes out
Oct. 21 on DVD.
As the film begins, Alexis (appealingly
played by Gina Rodriguez of the new CW
series Jane the Virgin and who has some
Jewish ancestry of her own) is living in Los
Angeles and working humiliating jobs in a
futile attempt to make ends meet.
She's summoned back to New York — her
more responsible sister Kayla (an acerbic
Ana Ortiz) advances the airfare — for the
funeral of a random relative. Moving back
in with her parents, Alexis naturally chafes
against their concerned (and loving) inter-
est.
The plot kicks into another gear when
Alexis and Kayla are hired to produce a bat
mitzvah party on one week's notice with a
tiny budget.
Propelled by the sisters' spiky banter and
further enlivened by the droll introduction
of a potential romantic partner, Sleeping
with the Fishes is a warmhearted and deeply
pleasurable saga of a resourceful 20-some-
thing's navigation past various bumps in the
road.
he is Jewish. The undersized Oliver
gets picked on, but coming to his aid
is a very nice Catholic priest.
Meanwhile, Maggie's long work
hours force her to get child care for
Oliver – and Vincent is home all the
time – so he's the logical choice. As
one might expect, Vincent exposes
Oliver to horseracing, bars and his
stripper "friend."
Advance articles about Fury
describe it as one of the most gritty
and violent American war movies ever
made. It is April 1945, and the war in
Europe is almost over. Brad Pitt plays
"Wardaddy," a battle-hardened Army
sergeant who is sent, with his five-
man Sherman tank crew, on a deadly
mission behind German lines.
The tank crew includes three
Jewish actors: Jon Bernthal, 38; Shia
LaBeouf, 28; and Logan Lerman, 22.
Also in the cast is Jason Isaacs, 52,
Gina Rodriguez and Ana Ortiz in Sleeping with the Fishes
"I didn't want this to be a Jewish and/or
a Latina film:' says Fisher, who spent four
years in Los Angeles doing stand-up com-
edy.
"For me, it was really more about the
mother-daughter relationship than anything
else because I tried so hard not to identify
myself as one or the other — but just as
Nicole — because it was so cloudy growing
up and trying to figure out where I fit in."
A turning point was the film's West Coast
premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film
Festival in the summer of 2013.
"I was very nervous," Fisher recalls, "not
only because it was the first Jewish forum
— but the demographic of the audience was
easily 50-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus. I've never
seen more walkers and scooters in my life.
And it was 500 people, too.
"So I'd gone from the Brooklyn Film
Festival, where it was 200 mostly family and
friends, so I felt a little safe, into a whole dif-
ferent world for me, and it was probably in
our top-three best responses ever"
Fisher laughs at herself and elaborates on
the happy misperception she had of her own
work.
"When I wrote this film, I could have
sworn that my demographic was going to be
young, possibly more Latino than Jewish:'
Fisher says.
"I have to tell you: After all the screenings
we've had, I was definitely wrong. It appeals
to a much older crowd. A lot of people seem
to enjoy the quality of the humor because it's
not like I'm just dashing off stereotypes. I'm
speaking from a voice of my own personal
as a captain who is
Wardaddy's mentor.
Two footnotes:
The German Tiger
tank was much better
11 armored and had more
firepower than the
A
Sherman. It shocked
Bernthal
American crews who
came up against it. Authentic Sherman
and Tiger tanks, procured from muse-
ums, were used in filming.
Lerman, in a recent interview, men-
tioned he had a bar mitzvah. LaBeouf
has previously mentioned his bar
mitzvah. Not sure about the other
two, but it is possible this movie co-
stars four former bar mitzvah boys.
.:
Too Odd
You might have caught on-air inter-
views with a Dr. Mitchell Levy and
his wife, Diana Mukpo, concerning
experience
The response to Sleeping with the Fishes is
especially gratifying to Fisher given her con-
cern with depicting her family onscreen.
"The process of writing something so
close to home — and with characters that
are literally your family — was stiffing for
me:' she admits.
"I was so afraid of insulting or offending
or hurting feelings on any level, or portray-
ing my mother to be super evil."
Fisher laughs when this interviewer sug-
gests she must not have attended the Joan
Rivers School of Comedy, in which anything
— especially family — is fair game and feel-
ings don't matter.
"I would love to get to that point in my
comedy," she asserts. "For a first script, I was
overly cautious. I felt the need to protect my
family, not even knowing it would get to this
point with HBO. So now I'm really, really
nervous:'
Not so nervous, though, to refrain from
telling a childhood anecdote that provokes a
chuckle at her mother's expense.
"We did try doing seders," Fisher says. "It
just didn't work out. My mom would always
cook Puerto Rican food:'
❑
Sleeping with the Fishes is airing
on various HBO stations throughout
October and November. For a sched-
ule, go to: http://www.hbo.com/1*/
schedule/on-demand/detail/Sleeping
+with+the+Fishes/601402. The film
comes out on DVD on Oct. 21.
their son, Ashoka
Mukpo, 33. He's the
NBC cameraman who
caught the Ebola
virus and was flown
back to America for
treatment on Oct. 3.
Is there a Jewish
connection? Yes, but
a strange one.
Diana, who came from an upper-
class English Protestant background,
shockingly married leading Tibetan
Buddhist monk and teacher Chogyam
Rinpoche Mukpo in 1969, when she
was 16. Levy, who is Jewish, was a
follower of Rinpoche and his personal
doctor until the guru's death from
alcoholism in 1987.
Diana, who never divorced Rinpoche,
had a long-running affair with Levy, and
Ashoka is their biological son. They wed
after Rinpoche's death. ❑