‘Corner’ finds comedy, meaning in malaise

Friday, June 10, 2005 | by

michael fox

There is nothing distinctive about Leo Spivak. Like a lot of men in their 50s, he’s good at his job, makes a decent living and has a lovely, stable family.

And like plenty of middle-aged guys, he’s vaguely dissatisfied in a way that he can’t recognize, let alone articulate.

“King of the Corner,” a gentle and generous comedy directed by and starring Peter Riegert (“Crossing Delancey”), follows Leo as his cork gets tighter and tighter. When it finally pops, at an unexpected moment and in an unforeseen way, the results are both hilarious and profound.

“King of the Corner,” which screened last October in the Mill Valley Film Festival, opens Friday, June 10, at the Embarcadero Center Cinema. Riegert will appear at an evening screening June 11, as well as June 10 when he’s joined by co-star Rita Moreno.

This is precisely the kind of low-key but satisfying movie that adults (with good cause) lament nobody makes anymore. It will not likely play for weeks and weeks, so don’t delay.

Riegert’s directorial debut mirrors his own screen persona, which is to say it’s unpretentious, self-deprecating and uncommonly decent. That last is the most remarkable, given how deeply flawed most of the male characters are.

Based on Gerald Shapiro’s “Bad Jews and Other Stories,” which Riegert adapted with the author, “King of the Corner” centers on a marketing executive with focus group expertise who’s starting to find his work banal and crass.

His teenage daughter is becoming a bit of a problem child, and his wife, Rachel (Isabella Rosselini), wants him to lay down the law. Leo’s main concern, though, is his elderly father in Arizona, whom he jets out to see every other weekend.

Sol (Eli Wallach) is a curmudgeon of a high order, full of complaints and regrets. His longtime companion Inez (Moreno) and Leo wryly agree, “If he could have made a living pissing people off, he’d be a rich man.”

A man of no accomplishments, Sol still has the edge on Leo because he reinvented himself twice — when he left Lithuania for America as a boy, and years later when he moved to the desert after Leo’s mother died. Both of those took gumption, but what’s Leo ever done?

Leo numbly tolerates Sol’s kvetching, just as he hears Rachel’s imprecations and the demands of his ambitious protégé (Jake Hoffman playing a droll variation of Sammy Glick) with only one ear.

But his wake-up call arrives in the form of a rabbi with the moniker of Evelyn Fink (Eric Bogosian), a kind of wise fool who does his best counseling at the dog track.

Shapiro and Riegert aren’t interested in satirizing organized Jewish religion — although Leo’s earlier meeting with a funeral director, at Sol’s insistence, is savagely funny — but in upending cliches and reveling in the absurdities of everyday life.

“King of the Corner” moves at a deliberate pace until a pivotal event upends Leo’s world, and the film achieves a definite momentum although it stops well short of farce. In a sense its direction is backward, for Leo steadily regresses from adulthood to adolescence.

Until, that is, he’s on the verge of losing everything. Although Leo is not fully redeemed by the end of this mature and rewarding film, he’s discovered what it is to be a good Jew.




“King of the Corner” opens June 10 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.