You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023)

The bat mitzvah, that ancient rite of thirteen-year-old self-actualization, receives here the full Happy Madison treatment: a Toronto-shot Netflix comedy in which Adam Sandler's actual daughters play characters who are not his daughters, and the synagogue becomes a stage for status warfare. The film is adapted from a 2005 young adult novel and arrives with a 91 percent approval rating, which tells us critics found the adolescent anxiety charming and the nostalgia unfussy. The ensemble is aggressively multicultural, a half-Hispanic best friend, a half-Asian popular girl, an Indian-American sidekick, an Ecuadorian boy who materializes at the end to dance with our heroine. None of these characters ever discusses being any of those things. The diversity is wallpaper. Attractive wallpaper, hung with care, but wallpaper.

The film's most discussed sequence involves a floating maxi-pad, a dare, and a boy's approval, and it handles menstrual shame with a frankness that stops just short of a thesis. There is a female director, a female rabbi, and a central friendship between two girls who drive the plot through their own terrible decisions. Whether this amounts to an argument about anything is doubtful. It amounts to a texture.

Where the film does reach for instruction, it does so gently. Stacy interrupts her own Torah reading to confess her sins and publicly scold the boy who wronged her, and the congregation absorbs this as wisdom. The party culture of the suburban synagogue takes a few glancing hits, the excess, the competition, the DJ, though the film never suggests the money itself is the problem. The lesson lands on friendship and honesty, delivered in a single scene, then abandoned for a bake sale. We are left with a pleasant film that knows exactly how much it wants to say, and says slightly less.