There’s an air of forced excitement about putting “The Movie” in a title, like a tipsy party guest dragging someone on the dance floor against his will. And what do you know? Getting out on the floor is exactly what the opening of this adamantly cheerful documentary evokes, because “Hava Nagila” is the party tune only hopeless grumps can resist.
Well, if you’re a film critic, grumpy is a way of life. There’s about 30 minutes of actual movie in here, most of it concerning how the song evolved over the past 150 years, from its roots in Ukraine, to its arrival in Palestine in the early 1900s, to its role as a celebratory Israeli anthem, to its latter-day ubiquity at American bar mitzvahs. This history is relayed in narrator Rusty Schwimmer’s lightly ironic style, which barely varies even when the film (briefly and tastefully) evokes the Holocaust.
Otherwise, what you get is an awful lot of filler, including every performer who ever sang “Hava Nagila,” from Harry Belafonte to Glen Campbell using it as the flip side to “True Grit.” Director Roberta Grossman does include a section on “Hava Haters,” mostly the klezmer band the Klezmatics. They don’t like playing it. They don’t get nearly enough screen time, if you ask me.
By the movie’s end, the party guests may be ready to dance the hora — or they may find themselves sitting this one out. “Hava” will have its revenge, however: It’s still stuck in my head.