Judd Hirsch in iMordecai (Femor)

iMordecai manages to land a triple axel of questionable taste, blending a shallow take on surviving the Holocaust with sitcom schtick, while also posing as an iPhone commercial. Yet there are moments, though vanishingly thin, where you see what this film could have been. It’s based upon the life of the director Marvin Samel’s father. Though the filmmaker is working from a place of love, that doesn’t overcome the deficits of the script.

Mordecai (Judd Hirsch), an 80-year-old retired plumber, has boundless energy, jackhammering the shower stall in his condo to the consternation of his wife, Fela (Carol Kane). Meanwhile, his son, Marvin (Sean Astin), is trying to contact him, but dad’s 20-year-old flip phone, held together with duct tape, barely works. So Marvin decides to buy him an iPhone. Marvin has no interest until he sees a young woman, Nina (Azina Dinea Hale), teaching a digital art class at the electronics store. Eventually, he starts taking lessons on how to use this phone, and a world opens up to him even as it is closing down on Fela, who has been diagnosed with dementia. Meanwhile, his son is trying to sell his cigar factory, which is bolstered by loans from Mordecai, who is not optimistic or approving of Marvin’s venture.

As the story progresses, in fits and starts, Nina and Mordecai grow closer as they have a shared interest in art. Mordecai doesn’t so much as neglect Fela, who fears he is cheating on her, as he doesn’t take her diagnosis too seriously. Mordecai starts painting again, as he did as a boy, and the subject is his past as a child in World War II Poland. He no longer remembers his mother, and he hopes that painting will bring her back to him. The animated sequences of his childhood are the most creative and interesting part of the movie. They have an unforced lively energy that the rest of the film lacks.

For the most part, the more than qualified cast flounders through various shenanigans involving adorable, ornery old folk, entwined with maudlin platitudes about family and survival. (A 100-year-old Holocaust survivor’s every word hammers that point home.) And the choppy editing doesn’t so much as hop from drama to comedy as leap from tall buildings in a single bound.

There is a real honest message about family and healing in iMordecai, but the makers of the film instead settle for sentimental clichés.