HOLY ROLLERS 3 ½ stars
First Independent Pictures, Rated R
With U.S. news media increasingly filing stories bordering on fiction, it was inevitable fabrication in movies—whether documentaries or otherwise—would not be far behind. Last year’s “Roman Polanski: Wanted Dead or Alive” subjectively served up its own metaphorical judge and jury that just about cleared the longtime fugitive child rapist and famed filmmaker of all outstanding charges, while demanding judicial exoneration.
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And now first-time director Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers dramatically depicts the real-life Brooklyn Hasidic youth who participated in an international drug smuggling ring not as legally innocent, but rather defensively as gullible dupes of a larger manipulative criminal enterprise. If only such slack were cut for ghetto youth off screen.
Holy Rollers is based on the March 2000 conviction of 18-year-old Shimon Levita of the Bobova Orthodox Jewish sect for organizing a band of Hasidic high schoolers as drug smugglers under the innocent veneer of religious garb as they traveled between Europe, Canada and the U.S. while trafficking the reigning designer drug of choice—ecstasy. And though he was harshly condemned by the judge, along with the dozens of Hasidim from his tightly knit sect who showed up to support him, Levita received a mere 30-month sentence out of a maximum 15 years in prison, to be served at a government-run boot camp.
Justin Bartha (L.) and Jesse Eisenberg in Holy Rollers.
Jesse Eisenberg, who may have picked up a skill or two dodging the undead in Zombieland, turns up in Holy Rollers, this time eluding the authorities as he switches career aspirations from rabbi to controlled substance courier. Eisenberg is Sam, a confused and impressionable young man from an economically struggling family. After the stern parents of a girl he cares for reject him as suitable matrimonial material, Sam seeks to recover from his bruised self-esteem through financial pursuits. So when his rebellious neighbor Yosef (Justin Bartha) lures the despondent youth into the lucrative drug scheme in question through an Israeli smuggler, Sam reconciles his conflicted religious values with enormous denial he’s actually engaging in anything immoral.
Eisenberg surprises and impresses with his expanding dramatic range in movies, conveying with remarkable compassion the emotional complexity of a character caught between a repressive, isolating religion, and the decadent forbidden temptations of the larger society surrounding his thwarted world. Holy Rollers also probes, with unusual candor and insight, the mysterious Hasidic culture that seems to exist as a parallel universe preserved from a distant century.
And in a country that favors a punitive approach to drugs, with the imposition of harsh, draconian prison sentences rather than treatment and legalization, it’s refreshing to have a film like Holy Rollers out there, which casts a more humane light on the topic. But it’s unfortunate similarly inclined non-white characters in movies continue to be ferociously demonized and depicted solely with criminal intent, while white youth are more often than not simply psychologically troubled.
Holy Rollers: Sect, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.
Movies: 30 Minutes or Less
