The camera pans across the bedroom. It lingers on a stack of Freud volumes, then shifts to a mound of video games. A quick cut to their owner, a young man named J. He is lying in a hospital bed \xe2\x80″ and he is missing his right hand.
Swedish director Jonathan Metzger starts his story here, leading us on a roundabout quest to discover the reason for J’s amputation. But while it opens with great potential, Bit by Bit only ends up confirming that Swedish Jewish families are saturated with the same ingredients (guilt, hysteria, and some old-fashioned Jewish cooking) as those in America. A post-adolescent, shikse-loving, unemployed Nintendo connoisseur seems promising material for a comic expos\xc3\xa9 on the alienated Jewish son, but the film is less comic than it is cute and ultimately it’s less of an expos\xc3\xa9 than a reiteration of old themes.
Back in his hospital room, J begins recounting the tale of his lost hand \xe2\x80″ a device that gives Metzger the opportunity to trot out the entire family. We meet Dad, egging J on to a business degree and a Jewish marriage; Grandpa, emotionally entrenched in 1945, and Grandma \xe2\x80″ a roughly-sketched Jewish bubbie. The only truly original characters are J and his five-year-old brother, who listens to Britney Spears, inhales marker fumes, and handles his family with a degree of calm that belies his age.
J’s flashbacks soon coalesce into exposition, revealing the central plot point of the movie: J’s much-anticipated Nintendo competition. There’s just one catch: the contest is on the same night as the family Passover Seder, sending J on a quest to leave his Seder in time to compete.
And a suspenseless quest it is. J’s Nintendo obsession is unconvincing, as is his compliance to his family \xe2\x80″ ostensibly the driving conflict of the film. J doesn’t mind openly disrespecting his relatives and appears unmoved by religious tradition. There’s no evidence that he’s been coerced into attending the Seder, no apparent reason why he doesn’t leave. Meanwhile, Metzger, aiming for quirkiness, intersperses live scenes with episodes from animated video games. This virtual
Even the film’s climax, the seder itself, encompasses no more than an amusing version of a familiar scenario: a large Jewish family, herded together and forced to celebrate. We are privy to J’s father’s belligerence, and Grandpa’s threats to kidnap his American granddaughter and salvage her from the land of McDonald’s. We learn that J wears a Snickers bar around his neck as an antidote to Grandma’s force-feeding habits. But with the rest of the movie collapsing into cliches, these idiosyncrasies fail to coalesce into a distinctive film.
Perhaps the most daring stab at enlivening the family is Grandpa’s rant on the similarities between the Egyptians and the Nazis. And Bit does employ some brilliant comic details, its Jewish grandmother caricature becoming crystal-clear when we hear her telephone ring \xe2\x80″ sounding exactly like a medley of alarms. The film also helpfully illuminates that one of the greatest pains of losing a limb is trying to urinate without a right hand. And Metzger’s displays of hypocrisy and Jewish hysteria \xe2\x80″ Grandpa, in Orthodox garb, force-feeding J bacon, Dad coercing the reenactment of an airport arrival for the Camcorder \xe2\x80″ are absurd enough to be entertaining. But ultimately, the Seder scene is no more intriguing than the family scenes that Metzger’s viewers have likely experienced in previous films \xe2\x80″ if not at their own dinner tables.
By the time we finally learn how the loss of J’s prized limb came about, we’ve seen so much uninspired absurdity that it seems neither surprising nor extraordinary. And when J discovers a Nintendo competition for disabled video game aficionados, the viewer, unconvinced of his passion in the first place, hardly cares. Bit by Bit could be a comic portrait of the literal unarming of a Jewish son, if it only didn’t cut off its own possibilities first.
