You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
A character in the movie says, “I love them and hate them at the same time.” This is in reference to the mean girls who rule the social hierarchy of her middle school. But it could apply to everything about this stage of life from parents to crushes, best friends and even oneself. It’s a wonder any of us make it out of puberty alive.
The title “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” and much else about the film really does capture the fervency and priorities of that moment. The film is a valentine to the pains and messiness of kids on the brink of growing up. And it’s a valentine by Adam Sandler for his family: He plays father to characters played by his own daughters, while his wife plays mother to their daughter’s best friend.
Sunny Sandler does a great job with her debut as Stacy, alongside Sadie Sandler who plays Ronnie, her older sister and No. 1 cheerleader. Stacy describes her bat mitzvah as “a rite of passage,” the ceremony that marks a child’s entry into adulthood, as in many other cultures. But how well she knows it is another question entirely. As she prays à la “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” her concerns are more about the party than anything else she’s supposed to be learning about Judaism or being an adult. She tells her parents that everything else “is important to you and other old people and God and stuff, but to me, it’s the party.”
Stacy’s best friend since forever is Lydia (a delightful Samantha Lorraine), and the film really captures both the co-dependent intensity of friendship at that age where every moment is shared, discussed, cosigned and also just how little reading from the Torah (the first five books of The Bible) or mitzvah (charity project) happens in between those endless seventh-grade bar/bat parties. In a world where the theme for a marathon of such celebrations is more pressing than ever (“Candyland?” “Your Candyland theme is going to be the best of this year!” “Until your New York Theme!”), they appraise an elder kid’s Carnivale decorations like jewelers examining a diamond through their loupe.
Nice one! But yours will be better! They dream that someday they’ll live next door to each other with cute boyfriends in Tribeca or possibly even Taylor Swift’s building. So tightly bonded are they that Lydia writes the most personal part of Stacy’s bat mitzvah ceremony the speech with Stacy herself delivering only some light banter about finally being allowed access upstairs during sleepovers, which I think is really tender of her. (Lydia points out to Stacy’s parents that Stacy is not a great writer, and they go along.) And for Lydia, Stacy does an equally significant but more on brand move. She makes her the adorable biography video meant to elicit from the crowd right before Stacy descends in her grand entrance to the party.
And then things start going wrong, as they always do at these parties, and especially once your crush shows up. In trying to impress Andy (Dylan Hoffman), the cutest boy at school who also happens to be in a band with his handsomely disheveled father (“If you think he looks good with that guitar,” Lydia advises Stacy, “wait ’til you see him with his dad”), Stacy has a moment of total humiliation. A moment that involves roller skates she doesn’t know how to skate in. Which ends in Andy kissing Lydia. Which leads to the explosive moment when she says the words of our title.
There is a sweetness here about family and growing up and reflecting what I imagine Adam Sandler’s life with his family might be like: The father wears sweatpants and makes dad jokes (yeah, not much acting required there), but he loves those girls so much and truly would do anything for them including putting them through some tough love theater camp when their bad choices inevitably catch up with them.
The script by Alison Peck based on Fiona Rosenbloom’s novel has an affectionate appreciation for this “who do I want to be?” age where every given second contains both heart-stopping eagerness and terror about being impelled toward adulthood. In one early scene, Stacy insists on wearing stiletto heels (adult) so she can “twin” with Lydia (child). Her mother reluctantly agrees but tells her that after 20 minutes in those shoes she’ll have blisters on her blisters. Stacy teeters in the grown up shoes for about 20 seconds before she puts her sneakers back on, symbolizing both her allegiance to childhood and also her allegiance to her father, whose clothing style could best be summed up as “baggy.” A friend brags that her mom finally let her shave her legs and sighs that now they feel like they’ve been rubbed with wasabi, which is not something I ever thought a child would understand but then again what do I know; it’s 2021 and I’m watching a preteen give herself alopecia.
Afterwards, she is sad to find out that her friends are bringing her to a boy girl party. “I thought we were going to hang out and make slime.” Stacy is still too much of a kid to pretend that doesn’t sound like more fun.
The movie doesn’t do much better than Stacy when it comes to the bat mitzvah. The lively rabbi is played by Sarah Sherman of “Saturday Night Live,” who points out that volunteering at an assisted living facility so you can hang out with your crush does not qualify as a mitzvah project. But the rabbi’s goofy song, “God Is Random,” in response to the students’ questions about injustice in the world, misses an opportunity to share some wisdom about this universal question with the class and the audience. No one expects this kind of film to be a theological treatise, but some sense of how faiths and philosophers grapple with questions of meaning and purpose would be as much an acknowledgment of what it means to be an adult as walking in heels. The movie is pleasantly diverting, but it asks us to recognize Stacy’s and Lydia’s growing awareness of Andy’s shallowness when it doesn’t itself pass that test.
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