★★☆☆☆
Dough must have been filmed around the time Jonathan Pryce received rave reviews for his Shylock at the Globe in The Merchant of Venice in 2015, and in this new suburban drama he is a merchant of bagels and challah bread in Edgware, north London. While Pryce is still on full thespian overdrive as the Jewish baker Nat Dayan, he is horribly let down by a predictable paint-by-numbers script and some overcooked supporting performances. Nat has lost his wife the year before, and is clinging on to the routine at the family bakery, with a 4am start in the decrepit shop and no family to man the till since his son has, sensibly, become a rich lawyer.
In parallel is the story of an immigrant family: a Muslim mother and son who have fled Darfur, and the teenage boy Ayyash (Jerome Holder) finding the only employer who wants him is a dope dealer. This works well, but he needs a legitimate job as cover; and his mother, who works as the bakery cleaner, gets him in as Nat’s apprentice. You can probably see where this is going, from mutual prejudice to mutual respect and friendship, as a father-son relationship develops, but there are, yadda yadda, many obstacles along the way. In particular, an evil property developer, Sam Cotton (Phil Davis on near-pantomime form), wants to buy the row of shops and raze them.
John Goldschmidt directs what he calls this “comedic drama”, and there are some amusing scenes when, inevitably, some of the cannabis Ayyash is dealing gets into the dough, the produce sells like hot cakes and Jewish bridge circles across Edgware are on a giggly high. On the bridge circuit and leasing the shop to Nat is the desperate, newly widowed Joanna Silverman, played by Pauline Collins in another performance that could have been toned down. Joanna is keen on Nat and on making a quick buck from the developers.
The script, by Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson, does its best to explore everyday prejudices with an uplifting finish, but subtlety is lost along the way. This might have been better, with its small scale, as a one-off television drama rather than a cinema release.
15, 94min