Though it has little in common with 'Life Is Beautiful,' other than being a comic film on a Holocaust theme, 'Jakob the Liar' never had a chance with the critics
Sheli Teitelbaum
PITY THE POOR FILMMAKER who imagines there might be room in the world for another Holocaust comedy in the post-Benigni era. For that matter, pity Peter Kassovitz, who actually shot such a film long before Oscar-winning Italian director Roberto Benigni had mounted his conceptual drawings for last year's hit sleeper "Life Is Beautiful" onto storyboards.
When "Jakob the Liar" opened at September's Toronto Film Festival, a few critics deigned to acknowledge that the French director had (notwithstanding his movie's apparent thematic similarities with "Life Is Beautiful") done a not entirely disreputable job of adapting as a feature film the 1969 comic novel of the late Polish-born, German-Jewish writer Jurek Becker.
Typical of those reviewers who were complimentary was Kevin Miller, of the University Wire syndication service, who observed that: "'Jakob the Liar' isn't a bad movie at all; its respect for the horror of the Holocaust is actually more mature than that of 'Life Is Beautiful.'" Atypical was Newsday's Liz Smith, who gushed in her gossip column that Kassovitz's film "is a touching and suspenseful drama - a sensitive and deeply felt work, stirring as it roils up our fear and dread, yet overlaid with action and a deep, dark Jewish humor."
Shot in Piotrkow, Poland, and also in the director's native Budapest, this intermittently amusing but sometimes over-the-top fable is about a Jewish cafe owner - played in the movie by an unusually timid and self-effacing Robin Williams - who inadvertently inspires a doomed ghetto by embellishing the report of nearby Russian army advances he overhears on a radio at a Nazi police station. This snippet of news makes Jakob Heym a newly anointed macher among his fellow internees: They think he has a receiver, and almost without thinking he begins to fabricate additional reports. He also turns into a wanted man among the Nazis. Jakob eventually wants out of the whirlpool of spiraling lies he has created. But a Jewish cardiologist (Armin Mueller-Stahl) urges him to carry on with the hoax, noting that suicides have all but ceased within the ghetto since the first news of Russian victories.
With a $ 15-million budget and a cast of high-powered Hollywood character actors willing to defer any real payment until and in the unlikely event the film makes money, "Jakob the Liar" easily outclasses the book's one previous adaptation, a 1974 East German TV production.
Kassovitz, 61, who's been making films since the mid-60s, does an especially formidable job of recreating the book's cramped and squalid Lodz ghetto setting. He coaxes low-key, near-ensemble (though also often stereotypical) performances out of veteran character actors Alan Arkin, Bob Balaban, Mueller-Stahl (who had appeared in the TV production) and Liev Shreiber. Kassovitz even manages, after a fashion, to restrain actor-comedian Williams, whose portrayal of Jakob happily avoids some, though not all, of the emotive excesses that have tainted his most recent performances.
None of this, however, spared the Hungarian filmmaker the opprobrium of a majority of upmarket American critics, many of whom have dismissed his film as a maudlin, overblown "Life Is Beautiful" clone that lacks any of that movie's charms. The New York Times's Janet Maslin called "Jakob the Liar" "the Holocaust film to make Roberto Benigni look like Primo Levi." Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan damned it as "everything a Holocaust film shouldn't be," observing that it "plays like the kind of Holocaust film cynics feared 'Schindler's List' would turn out to be but wasn't."
Even Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwartzbaum, who usually gets stories with a Jewish angle impeccably right, dropped the ball when she insisted that "'Jakob the Liar' has a lot to answer for, coming a year after 'Life Is Beautiful' made the Holocaust palatable to the squeamish."
As Kassovitz himself has been learning since his movie's release in the United States - the film is projected to gross under $ 5 million - it does absolutely no good to protest that "Jakob the Liar" came before "Life Is Beautiful," and so, whatever its faults, could hardly be derivative. (Its release was held up so as to avoid competing with two other recent Robin Williams films, "Patch Adams" and "What Dreams May Come.") Or even that while both films embrace humor, Benigni's opus is quite unlike "Jakob," which strives for a modicum of historical accuracy even as its characters caper and cavort through the ghetto in a fashion sometimes more befitting a French bedroom farce.
"He doesn't even pretend to understand the Holocaust," Kassovitz said of Benigni in a telephone interview from Toronto. "I like 'Life Is Beautiful' very much, but it is an absurdist Italian fantasy. In fact, I was rather surprised our movie was compared to it at all."
Kassovitz encountered Becker's novel by chance during a visit to his parents' home in Budapest in 1990. The novelist, TV dramatist and teacher, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto as well as the Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, had been living in Frankfurt since 1977, when East Germany banned his books in response to Becker's protests over its ill treatment of several of his colleagues. The two men got on famously, and Becker expressed delight at the prospect of seeing his book done up as a Hollywood feature.
Kassovitz optioned the book and co-wrote a screenplay with French writer Didier Decoin, which his manager decided to shop with Williams's wife and manager, Marsha Garces Williams. She had little trouble convincing her husband that Jakob Heym was an appropriate role. With Williams aboard, finding the money and talent to move "Jakob the Liar" into production proved a snap.
"Becker had liked the earlier film well enough," Kassovitz told The Report, "but he told me what he missed in it was a real ghetto. We were careful, in fact, to make as exact a reconstitution of the ghetto as possible. We felt that (precisely) because it is comedy, the movie has to be realistic."
BECKER, WHO DIED IN 1997 AT the age of 59, would have appreciated Kassovitz's efforts even though he might have demurred over the singular absence of Yiddish voices or signs anywhere in it. Located about 16 miles south of Lodz, Piotrkow was the site of the first ghetto established by the Nazis in Poland. With production designer Luciana Arrighi and costume designer Wieslawa Starska, Kassovitz hit the archives, basing each costume and each set on photo-documentary research. "The story and its point of view are so close to me, to what I lived through and my feelings at that time," says Kassovitz, who survived the Holocaust in his native Hungary being hidden by a family.
Much more difficult, he says, was getting his cast - garbed as they were in ratty clothing embroidered with understandably daunting yellow stars - into the comedic spirit. Ironically, says Kassovitz, it was Williams more than any of his Jewish co-performers who had the greatest difficulty "amping up the laughs."
"We Jews have always used humor," says Kassovitz. "It is important to see how it can be used to keep your dignity in horrible situations. It's as realistic to have humor as it is to have historically accurate costumes. But for someone from Eastern Europe, it's easier to talk about than for Americans. Robin Williams is a sensitive man who is concerned about humanitarian issues, and especially the Holocaust. In fact, he carries a sort of guilt, and feels the burden of a certain responsibility. He was very careful about his own work. My job was not to restrain him. If anything, it was to get him to loosen up."
Despite the pummeling he and "Jakob the Liar" have received, Kassovitz doesn't think it is the last Holocaust film that will be made, or even the last Holocaust comedy. "If a movie is a good movie," he says, "then there is room for everybody. The Holocaust is an important event in human history. I don't think it can ever become the property of only a few people."