Benjamin Fiedler is the 12-year-old son of Jewish couple Adam and Joanne Fiedler. After attending the elaborate
bar mitzvah party for the son of Arnie Stein — which was done on a
cruise ship, with a
Titanic theme — Benjamin's parents decide to go all out for his bar mitzvah to compete with them. Benjamin is unsure of how he wants to do for the bar mitzvah party they will have for his 13th birthday in three months' time. Under pressure, he randomly chooses baseball as the theme. So Adam's plan for the festivities with the party planner is to rent
Dodger Stadium, complete with movie stars and everything. Adam even books
Neil Diamond to sing the
national anthem. However, Benjamin is trepidacious about it all and does not want to go through with it, as he does not even understand the words of the
haftorah he has to read as part of his bar mitzvah rite. To distract his father and try to stall the planning, he secretly invites his
estranged grandfather Irwin, who is now living on an
Indian reservation with a
New Age woman named Sacred Feather. When Benjamin's grandfather arrives, it puts a kink in the planning - as Irwin had a falling out with his son Adam, both for having left him and his mother when he was a teenager and for Adam's own humiliating bar mitzvah. Irwin manages to win over his grandson, whom he hadn't seen since right after the birth, Joanne and even Rose, who he'd abandoned and left to raise Adam alone. Irwin must then pull off somehow reconciling with his son while helping his grandson deal with the question of what it means to be a "man." Now seeing his bar mitzvah not as an excuse to throw a party but rather as a rite of passage in his Jewish life, Benjamin gets up the courage to tell his parents to call off the over-the-top bash they had planned. After he does very well at the service, the party is just a casual backyard affair with lunch, a
klezmer band (with a guest-star singer and guitarist, as Adam "couldn't cancel
Neil Diamond") who was there as a favor to Benjamin's grandmother. The Steins are there, envious of the non-expensive, yet successful party. Benjamin goes to extreme measures to distract Adam and Irwin from bickering, by walking into and sitting on the bottom of the pool. Ultimately he's successful in getting the father and son to reach peace, and Benjamin happily celebrates with lots of family and friends. ==Cast==