The Schvitz

One winter day, Barry, a stubborn old Jew, is taking his weekly schvitz (sauna). Two other old Jewish guys sit with him and have a redundant conversation about directions. Barry says they are predictable old shmucks and that he's exempt from old-Jewish-man syndrome. He promptly leaves.

He comes home to his small apartment to find that his wife, Shira, has put his ski boots aside in a grocery bag in their storage closet to donate. They argue: Shira believes that her husband's skiing days are behind him, while Barry believes he is, of course, still in his prime. Determined to prove her wrong, he goes skiing at Grouse Mountain the next day.

He pulls into the Grouse Mountain parking lot in ski gear, overdressed for the moderate Vancouver winter weather. He buys a half-day pass and rents skies at the rental shack. What ensues is a colossally humbling experience. A female rental attendant offers, to Barry's horror, a senior's discount. While alone on the chair lift, Shira calls him. Trying to slide his phone under his helmet, he drops it into the run below. At the top of the hill, he old-man-struggles to fasten his boots (facing the run his phone has presumably fallen into). He descends a small section of The Cut in an awkward, old-man-can't-ski fashion, and retrieves his phone. After picking up a little too much speed, he suffers a minor fall, inflaming his hernia.

Exhausted, Barry sits at the Starbucks at the base of the mountain on his phone. He decides to sell his boots, and calls every man in his phone until someone buys them off of him. He has one, short-lived conversation with a man whom Barry finds out has broken both hips and cannot ski. A short montage rolls of his one-liners to men who cannot buy them for whatever reason. Eventually, a fellow schvitz goer named Solly Buxembaum agrees to buy them for $200. Barry tells him he'll see him at the schvitz.

One week later, a smug Barry eats meatloaf in the kitchen. Shira questions why he doesn't just give Solly the boots for free, as she initially intended, as well as pesters him to see their GP,
Dr. Bergman, about his hernia.

The ski boot trade day comes. Barry sits with the three new old guys in the schvitz, glowing with superiority. He waits for Solly, who, after 30 minutes, doesn't show. The three other guys begin an unstoppable, unbearable conversation about their doctors —including Dr. Bergman—and collective hernia pains. To his horror, he is begrudgingly forced to insert himself, because he knows of Bergman and these pains. Suddenly, an old naked man bursts in and announces that Solly has died of a heart-attack. Barry cries out in frustration: it turns out that he's old, and is now stuck with the old-man ski boots.

The next day, Barry sits in he and Shira's living room going through the contacts in his phone with his ski boots by his side. Shira walks by him with his ice-skates in the same grocery bag. His eyes widen: it's happening again.

In the background of rolling credits, Barry sits on a bench outside lacing up his skates up.

(BTW: I have access to Grouse through my screenwriting instructor.)