MOVIE REVIEW : STAPLETON REIGNS IN ‘SWEET LORRAINE’

In “Sweet Lorraine” (Westside Pavilion), we get a bracing example of what can happen when film makers take subjects from the reality they know best.

“Lorraine” seems at first slight or predictable but as it grows, it deepens appreciably. By the end, it’s become a much more effective American Jewish nostalgia piece than, say, the movie of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” Even if it pales beside Woody Allen’s intricate charmer, “Radio Days,” it still has some of the breath of life.

In the movie, young Molly Garber (Trini Alvarado) joins her grandmother Lillian (Maureen Stapleton) at a Catskills resort, the Lorraine, apparently on its last legs. Once the gem of the Borscht Belt, the Lorraine is now run down, leaking in every direction, held together--barely--by a single handyman, staffed by a collection of exuberant kids, pursued by developers and with a clientele that has returned, year after year, more from sentiment than connoisseurship.

The story, again somewhat predictably, follows Molly’s growing attachment to the place, her later determination to rescue it--and also on her camaraderie with the crew, her bonds to Lillian, to her immediate boss (the salad chef Lee Richardson)--and a halcyon late-blooming summer affair with the handyman (John Bedford Lloyd).

First-time director Steve Gomer once worked beside his grandfather, also a salad chef, at the same resort--Heiden’s--that masquerades here as the Lorraine; later, Gomer married the owners’ daughter. Obviously, there’s a powerful personal element behind this story but the director and his writers, Michael Zettler and Shelley Altman, mostly manage to keep their tale from knee-jerk sentiment. They stay alert to the humor that can put up a sea wall against any gushing flood of nostalgia.

Best of all, perhaps, is the labor they’ve put into making the Lorraine a functioning hotel: following the hotel’s resident comedian (Freddie Roman) as he warms up the crowd, catching the hectic flurry of the kitchen and the deceptive smoothness of the restaurant outside. The staff is engaging: Stapleton, Richardson, Alvarado and a crafty collection of cooks and waiters. But so is the setup. There may be minor glitches here but Gomer has remembered everything so well, stylized and orchestrated it so smoothly, that the flow becomes beguiling. The movie has that delicious appeal of peeking inside a mechanism or a community and following its human clockwork. You expect Maureen Stapleton and Lee Richardson to be better than good. They don’t disappoint you; their scenes together have an old-pro silkiness and deft interplay. The younger actors, mostly from the New York stage, are often fine as well, especially Alvarado, Lloyd and Evan Handler--who, as the kitchen’s unofficial bookie, has that brisk waiter’s equilibrium and glib double-face down pat.

Focusing on the resort and on a series of archetypal, yet warmly observed characters, Gomer and his colleagues are largely able to draw us into this mixture of fiction and reminiscence; by the end, the hotel and much of its staff have become living--if familiar-- presences.

As in most low-budget, independent productions, there are flaws here, rough patches there. Sometimes the story gets as threadbare as the Lorraine. But the very sincerity of “Sweet Lorraine” (MPAA rated PG-13) and the affection that inspired it, carry it through most of its rough, bright summer.