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Jewish humor resurfaces in this Bathtub

You know Jerry Stiller, he's George's loony dad on Seinfeld. You know Stiller and Anne Meara, they're the comedy-team parents of hot Ben Stiller. I'm struggling for a hook to lure you to the Coolidge Corner for a one-week-only (March 5 through 11) US premiere engagement of the Meara-and-Stiller A Fish in the Bathtub. This charmer, which showed at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a totally gratifying night at the movies, and a very touching one.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I can't imagine anyone not getting a kick out of filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver's cross-generational comedy about the sudden bust-up of a 40-year marriage that affects children, grandchildren, friendships, a whole New York suburban neighborhood. All the Jewish humor that's vanished from the last handful of Woody Allen movies is here in abundance, thanks to a sharp, wonderful screenplay by John Silverstein, David Chudovsky, and the filmmaker's husband, Raphael Silver. And you'd have to go back to prime-time Walter Matthau in the '70s (A New Leaf, The Sunshine Boys) for such a consummate Jewish grouch and malcontent and all-around meshugenneh as Stiller's sour-faced Sam Kaplan, a retired owner of a ladies'-garment shop who starts a sentence like a normal person and then, turning bilious, SHOUTS THE ENDING!!! Somewhere, there's a good, though gravelly, heart. You can feel it.

Meanwhile, he's chronically abrasive, on the edge of verbally abusive, driving wife Molly (Meara) crazy. He's been barking at her, and everybody, forever. But this week, he sends her around the old bend. There are his ever-smelly cigars, each smoked with relish in the window-shut house. (Molly: "Put that out! You know they give you gas!") There's his foolish new pet: a multi-pound fish that he's brought home on a whim in a plastic bag and set free in their bathtub. As Sam describes it, "A little gift from me to me."

Finally, there's public humiliation when, at a party in front of some age-old friends, Sam screams at his wife again and again to "SHUT UP!!" You don't do that to proud and stubborn Molly. She packs a suitcase and moves in with her married grown son, Joel (Mark Ruffalo), a real-estate agent deciding whether to dare an affair with a slinky blonde client (Pamela Gray). Soon Molly has taken control of the kitchen of daughter-in-law Sharon (Missy Yager), tossing good things out of the refrigerator and rearranging the shelves so splendidly that Sharon can't find a thing.

Also, Molly starts dating, going out with a gentleman of many arcane facts and statistics (Bob Dishy) who brings her a present of Guinness's Book of Records. As for Sam, he just gets more insulated and more bitter, hiding out in his house, trying to avoid the man-hungry next-door widow (Phyllis Newman), or going for a salami-and-egg lunch and then bickering at the diner with all his male friends.

Yes, there's a sweet happy ending, and a deserved one. But getting there is lots of fun and honestly earns a couple of tears, too. Filmmaker Silver has been directing terrific character comedies since her groundbreaking independent film, Hester Street, in 1975. Other stellar movies: Between the Lines (1976), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), and Crossing Delancey (1988). But A Fish in the Bathtub is her best film ever, a gentle, decent comedy that glides along with unobtrusive directorial authority. Her greatest accomplishment here is the way her film seems 20 deep in beautifully shaped characterizations, whether it's a two-minute part of a woman at a bar, a Chinese herbalist, an immigrant teacher of driver's ed, or the wisdom and warmth of Anne Meara.

I mustn't forget to mention the lovely contributions of veteran Paul Benedict as Sam's gentle, soft-voiced friend, and of the great young character actress Jane Adams, who was so fine as the perennially abused lead in Happiness. Here she's sublimely ditsy and destructive as Sam and Molly's hysterically neurotic grown daughter.

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Last fall, the national press seemed to pass on the death of Bruce Williamson, for many decades the film critic of record for time-warp Playboy. Did anyone notice he's gone? But the death from a brain tumor of TV-famous Gene Siskel, at age 53, has been everywhere eulogized in the media. I didn't know Siskel, and I've been scornful of the "thumbs up/thumbs down" shortcut to film reviewing of Siskel & Ebert. And, like all print critics, I'm obviously jealous of their boob-tube millions. But Siskel's dying is such a terrible thing.

How can we honor his memory? I suggest a trip to the video store for a favorite Siskel film, one you've never seen. Siskel's taste was actually pretty interesting, far more unusual than that of most mainstream critics. (Thanks for the lists to Christian Escobar on the Net.)

Siskel's 10 best films ever: Citizen Kane, The Godfather 1 and 2, Dr. Strangelove, The General, Tokyo Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin' in the Rain, Pinocchio, Shoah.

Siskel's best films of the '90s, year by year: 1998: Babe, Pig in the City; 1997: The Ice Storm; 1996: Fargo; 1995: Crumb; 1994: Hoop Dreams; 1993: Schindler's List; 1992: One False Move; 1991: Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Odyssey; 1990: GoodFellas.