Mobsters dangle Sheldon Kasner from a suspension bridge as The Burial Society opens, and his pleas for salvation echo throughout the film’s 90 minutes. We cut quickly from the bridge to Sheldon’s arrival in the Jewish community of Middletown. An aptly named location: we are now in the middle of a plot, the middle of a life, and, we soon find out, the middle of a mess. Sheldon, a 40-year-old banker (who looks the part, sporting a drab suit, nerdy glasses, and hairline crawling up to the heavens) seeks a position in the local synagogue’s chevra kadisha\xe2\x80″their burial society, which in this case is a trio of brassy old men who perform ancient kabbalistic rituals to prepare dead bodies for interment. The men are skeptical of wimpy Sheldon, who looks a bit weak-stomached for the dead body biz, but he begs them for a chance. “I want to make a change in my life,” he tells them over and over again.
Then we find out why: Sheldon is on the run from the Jewish mafia. After he’s spent 20 years as an accountant at the Hebrew Loans Bank in the big city, his bosses have revealed their true occupation: they launder money for the mob, hiding it in an account they suggestively call the “Israel Fund.” When they accuse Sheldon of stealing two million dollars (the bridge-dangling explained), he escapes to the shelter of Middletown. Impressed by his chutzpah, the burial society welcomes Sheldon into their ranks, and then, in classic noir fashion, the plot twists deeper into a tale of murder and intrigue. Is Sheldon as innocent as he appears? Is the chevra kadisha?
Any more exposition would spoil Nicolas Racz’s elegant new feature film. And after the first half hour, the plot doesn’t matter so much. This film’s greatness lies in its subtext. Narrative twists aside, the very idea of The Burial Society is enough to evoke the major dilemmas of modern Judaism. Ponder the implications of this simple premise: the chevra kadisha seeks to continue tradition by shepherding dead Jewish bodies into the ground. The task of continuance lies in the task of burial. The very traditions of death and burial that the chevra kadisha wishes to sustain imply their own demise, and point toward an uncertain future when old customs will have been forgotten. Death itself demands that we accept change and progress as inevitable, almost ontological truths.
“You’re a different generation,” a Jewish mob boss tells his younger counterparts. “You have no values\xe2\x80″you don’t go to shul!” Indeed, assimilation offers power and freedom, and Sheldon can’t handle it. He lives with his mother until she dies. He fears germs. He gets seasick in the tub. “I’m tired of being scared,” he tells the chevra kadisha. “I want to live.” Sheldon’s is not a crisis of oppression, but of liberty.
Artists have long wrestled with crises of Jewish identity and assimilation. But The Burial Society takes the continuity question out of the mind and into the morgue, teasing the viewer with an endless parade of elderly Jewish corpses being prepared for the voyage beyond. By grounding the story in a world of guns and crime, Racz lends these issues a sense of danger and urgency. At the same time, he highlights their incongruity, juxtaposing the tortured psyches of a pseudo-Woody Allen, and mafia thugs afraid of the secular unknown, with the gruesome reality of bodily death and its successor\xe2\x80″the true unknown.
If death implies change, then the presence of change insinuates death into our lives. Sheldon is scared to live because he is scared to die, and Racz unearths the absurdity of that paradox by literally unearthing death itself. In doing so, he reveals the inevitability of death in progress and tradition themselves.
