Like every first-time filmmaker, Max Winkler can name a predecessor who informed his sensibility and worldview. Somewhat incongruously, the 20-something Angeleno is the latest in a long list of Jewish directors to salute consummate New Yorker Woody Allen.
“I watch his films weekly,” the affable, enthusiastic Winkler says. “They’re just fuel for me.”
One can readily discern the Allen influence in Winkler’s debut independent feature, “Ceremony.” It’s a slender rendering of the awkward, amusing and painful life lesson afforded a blustery but inexperienced young writer of children’s books (Michael Angarano) when he and a protégé crash the Long Island beach wedding of the willowy blonde (Uma Thurman) with whom he’s enamored.
For starters, there’s the smart, acutely verbal main character who doesn’t fit into banal, bourgeois society. He’s neurotic, self-deprecating and charming, albeit with a dash of impatience and abrasiveness. Does he get the girl, like Woody always does in his films? Well, you’ll have to see the movie.
Currently in limited release on four screens nationwide, it opens April 22 on four more, including in San Francisco.
“I’m not sure how religion informed the movie per se with the exception that it is a movie about outsiders going into a world that they know nothing about,” says Winkler, the 27-year-old son of actor-director Henry Winkler. “If the main two characters are Jewish, I can assure you that no one else at the party is.”
Winkler was raised and educated in Los Angeles, yet has long had a fascination with New York City. As a boy, he spent a lot of time there visiting his paternal grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors.
“I loved them very much, but because of the things that they’d seen they weren’t the most joyous to be around,” Winkler recalls. “I would always try to spend as much time as I could in places like Central Park and the Natural History Museum and use my imagination as much as possible.”
But along with those experiences of the real world of the Upper West Side, Winkler was assimilating Allen’s celluloid fantasies and peccadilloes.
“I love all his movies, but the ones that inspire me are ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ ‘Annie Hall,’ ‘Manhattan,’ ‘Husbands and Wives.’ In all those movies he’s having an existential crisis about what does it all mean.
“[My] movie talks about that, too: What is love? What is the most pure form of love? Is that love that you feel when you’re a young, reckless youth, is that the closest thing to real love you’ll ever feel before you start making compromises, and writing things off, and getting more insecure?”
Winkler takes a breath. “I like those characters who are right on the brink of a nervous breakdown and battling with it and going back and forth.”
In a humorous way, mind you. As Winkler notes, “It doesn’t get more Jewish than the last line of the movie: ‘I think I should start seeing your therapist.’ ”
Then, without prompting and with a smile, he offers a confessional hint of his film’s autobiographical aspect.
“Therapy’s a word that still comes in and out of life very frequently — bi-hourly — so it had to go in the movie somewhere.”
“Ceremony” opens Friday, April 22 at the Lumiere Theater in San Francisco.