REUNITING THE RUBINS Review: Slight, Inoffensive Familial Comedy at its Blandest
Timothy Spall stars as the head of a dysfunctional family, trying to mend its rifts in debutant director Yoav Factor's comedy, released this week.

rating:2
Nice bit of alliteration that, wasn't it? Featuring a veritable smorgasbord of British talent, as diverse as Timothy Spall, James Callis, Honor Blackman and Blake Harrison (who has a wonderful Golden Age name to defy his usual on-screen antics), Reuniting the Rubins is a dysfunctional family comedy that never seems able to channel the talent of its collected cast. Spall's character must unite his warring children, played by Callis, Harrison, Rhona Mitra and Hugh O'Conor at the behest of the matriarch of the family - Blackman's Gran, who is dying, naturally. The film is a British Royal Tenebaums if you will, only minus the oddball charm and with a definite sitcom edge to it, which can't survive its rampant caricatures - the problem is there is an obviously dilluted American spirit in the comedy and the dynamics between characters, albeit with a new, more acerbic British flavour, which simply doesn't work with the script. That script is particularly poor, and it is definitely despite it that any of the actors are able to do anything of note - Spall in particular, though charismatic enough in full bumbling mode, seems to be fighting a tide for the entire time, and the result is less than inspiring. Oddly, this is one of the first examples of a British Jewish film that seeks to explore the family dynamic and doesn't simply focus on the Holocaust or its ghosts explicitly, which is a surprising revelation, but one which I can't help but wish was achieved in the hands of another, better film.