English director John Goldschmidt's Dough is a perfectly nice, pleasant and harmless movie, until you let yourself think about it.
It's a little like The Odd Couple. Against the probabilities, two very different people join forces. An aging Jewish baker in an English town winds up sharing his life, and his bakery, with a young Muslim from Sudan. It's enough to make your heart swell with self-satisfaction and convince yourself – at least for a little while – that the world is just what you want it to be, and all things are in their place.
I'm not sure that such a gentle fantasy really is harmless though, and it has to do with the limits of "nice." Except for two paper-thin villains – who could both be named Snidely Whiplash – just about everyone in Dough is terminally nice. The baker's rich lawyer son, who wants his father to retire, may be patronizing and slimy, but he's still nice. The cops are nice, the young guys flirting with drug dealing and other criminalities are nice. Even the local drug lord is a soft version of a thug. And, of course, Nat the baker (Jonathan Pryce) and Ayyash, the kid from Darfur (Jerome Holder), are the nicest of all.
So what's so bad about nice? In this film, it's a lie about who people are.
Nat and Ayyash and the others are like toys. They may look like an Orthodox Jewish baker and a Sudanese immigrant – who's already selling drugs – but they wear those identities like the sets of clothes for Barbie dolls. A hint of opposition makes Ayyash and Nat dissolve into that awful picture of undifferentiated "nice."
Even comic fantasies need fiber. In the lovely comedy Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas has to lose stuff that matters to him before he finds himself. It's how his character proves that he exists and that the audience should care. The recent film Marguerite never goes easy on the woman's dreadful singing.
Unrelenting niceness becomes unbelievable. There's no challenge to it – and there's nothing for the laughter to fix.
Ayyash and Nat are marginal people. If Dough had any starch, it would see that's what might unite these two guys; that they are both outsiders and they're both in trouble. There's no reason to hide these qualities unless the film wants to pretend that nothing is changing. Dough is not about to let go of its belief that Nat – the white man, even though he's Jewish – is the model of how life should be, and he can be the guide for the audience to welcome Ayyash into their fold.
Dough robs both Nat and Ayyash of their actualities, which could be far more engaging and funny than what the movie puts on screen. The film needs them to threaten each other somehow, to threaten us. Imagine how it would shake up the movie's white audience if Ayyash brought Nat into HIS world.
Dough has other problems too. It's oddly inarticulate and amateurish. The cutting tends to be just a hair slow, so that shots leave characters standing with nothing to do, as if they're slow in the head and the actors don't know what to do. It's unfortunate because both Jonathan Pryce and Jerome Holder are perfectly good for their parts.
Dough comes off like work from a beginning screenwriting class with ponderous foreshadowing and mechanical turns of plot. The joke of marijuana in the bread stalls. You know the moment that Nat watches Singin' in the Rain with his granddaughter that somehow, some way that scene of Gene Kelly tromping through the rain is coming back into this movie, just as you know from the two opening sequences – one of Nat and one of Ayyash – that those disparate worlds will be brought together seamlessly, except that Nat's way is right and to make it in this world, Ayyash has to surrender his reality.
