Just
as serious films about the Vietnam War haunted the 1980s,
so now in the late 1990s World War II is the war of choice
for filmmakers. Except that not all are so serious. If in
1998 Life Is Beautiful
could make filmviewers ponder about the need for hope and
humor to make life meaningful, now in 1999 we have Jakob
the Liar (with Robin Williams in the title role),
with far more epigrams that only ends (to quote from the film)
when the curtain falls. A remake of an East German film of
1974, Jakob the Liar's release was delayed when
Life Is Beautiful made such a big hit last
year; the physician Dr. Kirschbaum in the 1999 version is
played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, who was in the original version
in German. The film depicts the a Jewish ghetto in 1944 Poland,
where men and women are worked hard unloading bags of cement
from boxcars. Filmed in Hungary and Poland, the ghetto is
divided from the rest of the city with barbed wire fences
and high walls (the latter resembling the wall at the end
of Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place (1970),
recalling the scene of a serial murder from a film that so
shocked the British that Parliament abolished the death penalty).
Jews are forbidden to leave the ghetto unless under military
escort, must observe an 8 p.m. curfew, and they cannot have
a radio or other source of news. When the film begins, Jakob
chases a newspaper that is blown over the wall by the wind,
ending up at the fence, where an obtuse sentry tells him to
report to the Gestapo headquarters for violating the curfew
despite the fact that it is a few minutes before 8 p.m. While
in an office, awaiting an officer's arrival, he hears on the
radio that Russian troops are 400 km away in Bezanika, Poland.
The officer releases Jakob, since the curfew has not started,
but as he tries to return to the ghetto, the gate closes;
searching feverishly for a way back, he runs into ten-year-old
Lina Kronstein (played by Hannah Taylor-Gordon), who has escaped
from a train taking her parents to a death camp. She finds
a gap in the fence, they crawl through, and he proceeds to
house her in the attic of his café in an Anne Frank manner.
However, he leaks to his friend Mischa (played by Live Schreiber)
about the proximity of Russian troops, a fact only explicable
as it spreads throughout the ghetto if Jakob Heym has a secret
radio. Next, Jakob's friends beg for more news, and he comes
up with credible lies, and soon the suicide rate in the ghetto
plummets to zero. Hope has produced joy. However, some of
his friends fear that informers will tip off the Germans,
leading to repression, and they are correct. Although Jakob
confesses to the Gestapo that he was lying, and they demand
that he tell the Jews in a public square, he refuses and is
shot, But the advance of the Russian army forces the Germans
to abandon the town, and the Jews are put on a death train
that is intercepted at the end of the story by Russian tanks.
The film is chock full of Rodney Dangerfieldisms, but I recommend
seeing the film on a Saturday night with a large audience
to enjoy the laughter; perhaps the high point is reached when
Jakob tries to simulate a BBC broadcast to Lina (reminiscent
of Groucho Marx's telephone operator scene from A Day
at the Races). Yet another plus about the film is
the music, the most delightful film score that I have heard
since The Sting (1973). For those who remember
life in the ghetto as unbearable, the film's piles of dead
bodies, public hangings, and torture victims may be a considerable
disappointment, but director Peter Kassovitz's parents were
sent to concentration camps and survived. However, the film
is based on fiction, the novel Jakob le menteur by Jurek Becker,
who spent part of his boyhood in the Lodz ghetto and concentration
camps in Poland. The message is more eloquent and weightier
than Life Is Beautiful: Jews have survived for
thousands of years of oppression because they have their wits
and their wit, both mightier than the sword, and the world
as a result is much better off. MH
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