From indie filmmaker Jonah Feingold comes 31 Candles, a low-budget coming-of-age romantic comedy driven by sincere, relatable characters and a refreshingly thoughtful screenplay.
Feingold casts himself as Leo Kadner, a 30-year-old Jewish filmmaker whose career has thus far amounted to directing saccharine Christmas movies stuffed with shameless product placement courtesy of overbearing studio executives. He is visibly dissatisfied and resigned to his creative rut, but is still driven by the stubborn belief that he has a story worth telling. Given the holiday theme of his work, it is a minor missed opportunity that the script never riffs on the fact that much of the Christmas music canon was written by Jewish composers.
Kadner also carries a lingering grievance from adolescence: After his parents’ messy divorce when he was 13, he never had a Bar Mitzvah. Jewish tradition may insist it’s never too late to come of age, but for Leo, emotional arrested development comes more naturally than spiritual growth. He is a hopeless modern romantic, caught in the anxious purgatory of dating apps.
“I was off the apps, and then I went back on the apps, and then I deleted my account, but just this morning I got back on them,” he explains to his mother while attempting, in vain, to convey the neuroses of millennial dating. His strategy isn’t exactly healthy, but it is an accurate portrayal of contemporary practices: “I’ll just do the normal thing — go home, see if she has an Instagram, if it’s private, I’ll go private browsing mode, I’ll go to her LinkedIn. I’ll see what she’s been up to.”
It’s at the intersection of this romantic confusion and his neglected Jewish identity that 31 Candles finds its narrative backbone. After a chance reunion with Eva Shapiro (Sarah Coffey), his intelligent, quietly luminous (and physically imposing, towering over him at 6-foot-1) crush from Jewish summer camp, Kadner learns that she now works as a Torah tutor preparing children for their Bar Mitzvahs. Too shy and timid to ask her out directly, he instead hires her as his tutor, promising to finally hold his Bar Mitzvah before his 31st birthday — an excuse to see her every week under the flimsiest veneer of religious purpose.
The problem, as Feingold understands all too well, is that Kadner embodies a defining delusion of modern dating culture: the belief that one can drift from one “situationship” to another — each with a romantically detached, emotionally ambivalent muse — while still holding out for “true love.” He insists Eva is his soulmate while simultaneously going on hollow dates with women who say things like, “I’ve kind of been grappling with my existence as an individual and also as an artist. I don’t want to be defined by my art, but my art is what defines me.” When he asks what kind of art his date makes, she replies: “Oh, I do TikToks.”
What Kadner refuses to confront is the simplest truth of adult relationships: Meaningful love requires risk. You either pursue it honestly or step aside. Instead, he hides behind irony and passive longing. The charade leads to a series of Hebrew study sessions, Shabbat dinners, and increasingly awkward attempts to impress Shapiro. In one scene, after she mentions her love of antiques, he gives her a tour of his apartment and points to a pewter kiddush cup and plate setting, claiming it belonged to his great-great-grandmother; the attached price sticker casts a degree of doubt.
Yet 31 Candles isn’t simply a rom-com about a hapless man chasing an unattainable woman. It’s also about Kadner’s reluctant reconnection with the faith and heritage he has long treated as ornamental. He tells people he was raised “Jew-ish.” When Shapiro assigns him a Torah portion from Genesis to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah, he deflects with a joke: “Oh, I love Phil Collins.” But as she walks him through the meaning behind Hebrew prayers and rituals, he begins to discover a connection to a rich tradition he never bothered to claim.
If that setup evokes Woody Allen — an insecure Jewish New Yorker wrestling with romantic dysfunction — Feingold isn’t hiding the influence. In the same way Mozart shaped the piano concerto, Allen helped define the neurotic New York love story. 31 Candles borrows from that tradition with its witty, conversational dialogue, semi-autobiographical storytelling, and self-deprecating humor. But it is far from a pastiche. Where Allen’s films often treat relationships as intellectual puzzles, Feingold pairs romance with a sincere search for faith and identity. Through his pursuit of Shapiro, Kadner achieves something far more profound: he finally grows up.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.