Prime directed by Ben Younger; 2005, color, English, 106 minutes.

By Donald H. Harrison

Romantic comedies generally run along the plot line of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy... Prime has a twist:  A 23-year-old boy meets a 37-year-old woman, who just happens to be a patient of his Jewish mother, the psychiatrist.  

Mom (Meryl Streep) can be quite urbane when discussing relationships with her patients, but when it comes to her son, David (Bryan Greenberg) dating the non-Jewish Rafi (Uma Thurman), she reverts to her inner shtetl-dweller.  Nevertheless, she decides not to let on to Rafi that she knows David is her lover.  In one hilarious scene, Rafi confides to her therapist that David's penis is so beautiful, she feels like knitting a cap for it.  (Maybe a yarmulke?)  Meryl Streep's pained expression is unforgettable.

There are some quick takes on the Jewish fear of assimilation, as when David tells his mother that she acts as if they live in the Warsaw Ghetto instead of New York City's Upper West Side where "we're stronger in numbers." When David's father wonders which denomination of Christian the girlfriend is, the mother blandly inquires: "Do you prefer one denomination over another, as far as the love of Christ goes?"

The film makes the point that notwithstanding the Baron de Rothschilds among us, most Jews are far from wine snobs—or why else would we keep sickly sweet Concord grape wine chilled in the refrigerator and endure it on Passover? 

There's also some gay humor, offered by Rafi's brother and his lover, who describes David as "Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof."  Perhaps the funniest shtick is the grandma of David's conscience, pictured as an old peasant woman in a babushka, who smacks herself on the head with a frying pan whenever David strays too far from his Jewish roots.