Stream It Or Skip It: ‘You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah’ on Netflix, in Which Sunny Sandler Outshines Her Very Famous Father

You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah (now on Netflix) is the latest in a string of Watchable Adam Sandler Netflix Exclusives, something I never expected to see considering the superstar comic’s deal with the streamer began with miserable shit like The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over and Sandy Wexler. This new one is only technically an Adam Sandler film, as he’s part of a supporting cast for his daughter Sunny Sandler, starring as a 13-year-old girl working her way through various mishaps and stupdicisms on her way to her titular Jewish rite-of-passage ceremony. In fact, the whole Sandler crew anchors the film – Adam’s eldest daughter Sadie Sandler and his wife Jackie Sandler also star (although his on-screen wife is played by Idina Menzel). Now, I’m tempted to retitle it Nepo Baby: The Movie, but that would be too mean for a film that’s just sweet enough to win you over.  

YOU ARE SO NOT INVITED TO MY BAT MITZVAH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) fantasizes about having a bat mitzvah bash on a yacht with a special performance by Olivia Rodrigo, but she’ll have to settle for the local rented dining hall and DJ Schmuley (or maybe the guy from Cha Cha Real Smooth). So it goes. I mean, her family lives in a house that’s incredibly expensively spacious (and is probably considered to be an “average home” from the perspective of filmmakers who’ve been very heavily moneyed by Netflix), but they surely can’t afford that level of extravagance. Anyway, Stacy and her forevs-bestie Lydia (Samantha Lorraine) are coming of age together, because they do everything together, and have been doing everything together since they were toddlers. That includes preparing for their respective bat mitzvahs, being excluded by the cool kids at school and (gulp) crushing on the local squeaky-voiced teen, Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman), who we all immediately peg as a vacant lot, but I guess we aren’t under the influence of teen-girl hormones firehosing from every pore.

Stacy is dragging her feet writing her bat mitzvah speech and all that, because that’s what teenagers do. She’s also tasked with putting together a video for Lydia’s party, because Stacy’s good at that, but what her other interests are beyond staring at her phone and being mortified by her parents remain unknown. Just call her an Average Teen That Anyone Can Relate To, because any more specifics about her might alienate potential movie watchers? I dunno. The plot she finds herself in is riddled with awkwardnesses and mishaps ranging from stuttery attempts to be cool in front of Andy Goldfarb, to an attempt to impress the cool kids by jumping off the gorge cliff into the swimming hole (which I’m reasonably certain is the same gorge/swimming hole from Grown Ups 2; correct me if I’m wrong, please) and watching her menstrual pad float to the surface, and even if it’s not quite the petite size and is very much a normal size, to her, it surely looks like a breaching humpback whale. Mortification! 

The fallout from this social teenage apocalypse is dire, at least in Stacy’s head, which to an Average Teen That’s Anyone Can Relate To, is the only perspective that matters. And then she spots Lydia tight-lip-kissing Andy MacGuff- er, Goldfarb, which is the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption of BFF betrayals – fissures erupt, earth gets scorched, everyone in the periphery gets covered with ash and/or incinerated. So Stacy concocts a plan to steal Andy Goldfarb from Lydia by stalking him at his grandmother’s nursing home, sending him duck-lipped kissyface pictures, stuff like that. Meanwhile, all the one-note characters in Stacy’s life deal with her teenage emotional miscellany: Her mother (Menzel), her father (Adam Sandler), her older sister (Sadie Sandler), Lydia’s mother (Jackie Sandler), Lydia’s father (Luis Guzman), her wacky rabbi (SNLer Sarah Sherman), the sweet kid who she should be paying attention to (Dean Scott Vazquez), and two other girls from her friend group (Millie Thorpe and Dylan Dash). Will Stacy ever get through this? Nah, probably not. It’s pretty clear her life is ruined forever.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: YASNITMBM (pronounced yah-snit-mibbem) is the Sandler version of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret: It’s based on a YA novel (Fiona Rosebloom’s 2005 book), features menstruation as a plot point and finds its protagonist directly addressing the deity itself in voiceover – but it’s littered with dopey gags, so it’s not exactly the same! The film also wants to be compared to John Hughes coming-of-agers so badly, it even sets a scene at a theater that’s showing Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and other ’80s teen touchstones.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s tempting to say the movie wouldn’t work without Sunny Sandler’s winning performance. She avoids precocity and phony overtures to find a more natural, believably inelegant teen-on-screen presence – and transcends some of the limitations of the material, which not just anyone can do.

Memorable Dialogue: Andy Goldfarb the Inarticulate Lump of Dudespeaking Goo flaunts his unintelligence when he says, “You have the patience of a saint – a Jewish saint!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Yah-snit-mibbem feels hodge-podgy and directionless at times, and doesn’t build up much dramatic inertia as it clumps along to its inevitable high-pressure third-act bat mitzvah scene (or scenes, plural, as Stacy’s comes right on the heels of Lydia’s). But I guess its lumpy, episodic nature feels sort of like real life, if you want to be an apologist about it. And it’s easy to want to be an apologist for this movie, since Sunny Sandler gives such a likable performance, finding an instinctive, lived-in chemistry with Lorraine; the wholly believable BFF relationship at the heart of the movie is of sturdy enough construction to withstand volleys of dopey humor and cliched plot points. (And it’s clear that Sunny’s pops is stepping aside to give her the spotlight – his presence is relatively minimal, and finds him inspiring a light chuckle or two by leaning into his amiable-slob/clueless-dad persona.)

Set aside the strong headlining performance and you’ve got your run-of-the-mill hit-and-miss comedy: Old ladies saying high-larious things, scene-stealing maneuvers from Sherman, PG-13 crude-lite gags about body hair and below-the-belt gaseous emissions, etc. The film finds some specificity in Jewish cultural fodder, which offers opportunities for earnest expression and inside jokes – it might be the most unapologetic display of American Judaism since, um, A Serious Man? The movie gets that right, and more importantly, the ups and downs, the love and forgiveness, of its core relationship, which feels real where some of the accoutrements are phony and manufactured. The idea of being best friends “forever” may be idealistic, but neither is it a joke.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s hard not to like You Are So Not Invited To My Bar Mitzvah, which underscores its sillier elements with just enough substance to make it viable viewing for tweens and their families.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.