"The Tollbooth" comically explores a Jewish family from Brooklyn through the eyes of Sarabeth Cohen -- an activist painter in her first year out of art school. She really wants to rebel, but she is forced instead to learn from her family; Ruthie, her well-meaning but traditional-and-loud-about-it mother, Isaac, her holocaust-obsessed-philosopher-quoting father, Becky, her lesbian medical-student sister and Raquel, her nurturing self-sacrificing sister. She also gains some tough insight from
Simon, her boyfriend from art school, who graduates and chooses the suburbs, a good job and an entertainment center over a life filled with uncertainty in New York City. This honest and funny story follows the characters through one poignant and pivotal year as the family learns, rebels, fights and finally embraces their differences in this highly entertaining ensemble film.
Lack of perspective and shaky comic tone plague Tollbooth -- Debra Kirschner's DV-shot saga of a Brooklyn Jewish girl trying to make it in Manhattan as an artist -- sinking it in a morass of whiny cliches.
Watching its roster of decent actors struggling to overcome the banalities of their roles makes the price of getting through The Tollbooth very high indeed.
Sokoloff works hard to make her aspiring artist likable, and buried deep under the mountain of clichés is a decent story of a young Brooklyn woman trying to find her own way. But to have to swallow such ham-fisted writing and direction?
In The Tollbooth, 22-year-old Sarabeth Cohen (Marla Sokoloff), a self-described 'feminist artist,' talks us through the travails of her Jewish-American family and her own coming of age.
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