Keeping The Faith film review

certificate_12

KEEPING THE FAITH

Harking back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, Keeping The Faith is an instantly appealing tale of love and rivalry among the pews andpulpits.

Jake Schram (Ben Stiller) and Brian Kilkenny Finn (Edward Norton) are best friends from childhood on New York's Upper West Side.Their lives have followed strikingly similar paths. Jake is a rabbi whose glib sermons are rapidly turning him into a local celebrity, and Brian is a Roman Catholic priest whose idealism provides comfort to his congregation.

Both are confident and hugely successful, but neither has experienced the joys of falling in love. Brian is happily single, more concerned with ministering to the masses, and Jake is so busy trying to stop his mother (Anne Bancroft) from setting him up with every pretty young Jewish girl in the city, that he doesn't have time to find a mate of his own.

So it comes as something of a shock to both of them when their childhood friend Anne Reilly (Jenna Elfman), now a beautiful corporate executive, arrives in town for two weeks, immediately re-entering their lives and their hearts with a vengeance.

Jake and Brian are instantly smitten, but neither wants to declare their true feelings to Anna. But temptation proves hard to resist, and as the temperature rises in the city, so the two holy men find their thoughts turning to romance.The first half of Edward Norton's directorial debut exhibits a playfulness and wry sense of humour towards relationships and religion reminiscent of Woody Allen.

Quotable lines fizz pleasantly on the actors' tongues - "I have a relationship with my phone. It's set to vibrate," declares Anna - delivered with perfect comic timing by the three attractive leads.By the time the holy men are preparing to come to blows, using their skills as orators like duelling pistols, the tone of Stuart Blumberg's screenplay has become much darker, with the wrecking balls of jealousy and guilt crashing through the trio's once stable lives.

Norton directs with the lightest of touches, and in front of the camera, he shows a deftness for comedy, but sensibly lets Stiller (plying his trademark little-boy-lost charm) take the lion's share of the movie.