"Crossing Delancey" is a heartwarming romantic comedy, but it's so much more than that. It's a masterpiece in miniature, one of those miraculous movies that gets everything right: it's beautiful to look at, pure pleasure to watch, a moment-in-amber time capsule of a place, time, and community; it's an artistic success; it's deep, it's funny, and it makes you feel good. "Crossing Delancey" isn't "War and Peace," it's a small story about one woman and her one decision, but faithfulness to tiny details results in depth.
The 1980s Manhattan of Isabelle, (Amy Irving) a thirty-something, well-educated, underemployed single Jewish woman, is so faithfully recreated the film feels like a well-made documentary. A rabbi who is on screen for mere moments is so believable I googled the actor to find out if he was a real rabbi. There is a kid selling used books on the sidewalk who is so convincing as a kid selling used books I wondered if he weren't some merchant they just found in his street-side stall and immediately inserted into the movie.
Jeroen Krabbe as arrogant author Anton Maes is so believable I want to reach through the screen and smack him. Just one scene, a literary soiree where Krabbe glares at a poetess as she condescendingly advises him to write something in his native language is worth the price of admission. Krabbe's face is partly obscured by his hand; all you see are his eyes. Their murderous look is as mesmerizing as a venomous snake.
Peter Riegert packs what could have been a dreary role – that of a pickle salesman – with fascination, subtle intelligence, and heart. Every character is perfectly cast; every performance is pitch perfect; everyone is the embodiment of the type of person a real Isabelle would have met in her real life.
When I do rewatch this movie, I have to watch it over and over, just to cherish every little morsel: the Jamaican cabbie, the steam room anecdote, the heavily made-up street singer who enters a hot dog shop and sings "One Enchanted Evening" with an oracle's intensity, the delivery of the line, "four men and a cabbage;" even just the names of minor characters, "Cecilia Monk" "Pauline Swift" – and their hairdos – are to be savored.
The sets are equally, painstakingly, perfect. Just the signage alone: "A joke and a pickle for only a nickel," and "Schapiro's: the wine you can almost cut with a knife," and, in Isabella's bookstore, the sign for "cashier" is shot so that it looks like "hier," French for "yesterday," appropriate for a movie focused on the past and the bittersweet passage of time.
Isabelle lives in available-male-shortage Manhattan. She's nagged by loneliness, her grandmother, and her biological clock. She sleeps with a married, handsome neighbor who offers her nothing but one-night stands. She yearns for a glamorous author she's met at the bookstore where she works.
Her grandmother fixes her up with a "pickle man," and Isabelle twists and turns for the rest of the film, weighing the advantages of a solid guy who might treat her lovingly, versus the attractions of a glamorous novelist who excites her. Isabelle's struggle is intimate and unique, played out in the microcosms of the formerly Yiddish Lower East Side and suave uptown Manhattan literati, but it's universal, as well. Dreamers everywhere must calculate whether to invest in the near, solid and familiar, or risk everything with the attractive and impossible-to-reach shooting star, and must face those moments when what had seemed attractive suddenly looks toxic, and what had seemed common suddenly reveals its hidden beauties.
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