It's a safe bet that any romantic comedy promoting itself as "a funny movie about getting serious" is likely to be neither very funny nor particularly serious. But this one at least includes the novelty of a circumcision scene, and the poor victim (in his big screen debut) exhibits more honest emotion than any of the primary characters, including Amy Irving as a modern, unmarried New Yorker who moves among the uptown literary elite but can't quite sever her ties to the Lower East Side. The film, not unlike its heroine, is unnervingly passive and vacillating, a thirty-something exercise in shallow emotional distress with not enough conflict to keep it interesting. Will she fall in love with self-centered, best-selling novelist Jeroen Krabbe or a sincere but unexciting pickle maker (Peter Riegert) with hidden depths? The outcome shouldn't come as a surprise: Irving and the pickle man were obviously made for each other, but when she finally kisses him it's with no more conviction than in anything else her character does in the film.
Review of Crossing Delancey
