Movie Review: FUGITIVE PIECES (2008) B

One more movie about a holocaust survivor.  Not to diminish the horror of the holocaust . . .  many of this genre of movie fit into a predicable pattern.  Usually the film is about a person who escaped, lost their loved ones, and the depression they feel. 

Fugitive Pieces tells the story of Jakob Beer, a man whose life is haunted by his childhood experiences during WWII. As a child in Poland he is orphaned during wartime then saved by a compassionate Greek archeologist. Over the course of his life, he painfully attempts to deal with the losses he has endured. The movie was slow so that the viewer could feel the pain also.  At the unrealistic end of the film, through his writing, and then through the discovery of true love, Jakob is ultimately freed from the legacy of his past.  Not really believable.

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The movie has little dramatic momentum, and its journey is essentially Jakob's incremental acceptance of his fate. But Dillane (the actor) and the writer-director Jeremy Podeswa create such a compelling central character that it hardly matters.

His journey towards peace of mind involves lots of lyrical philosophizing, which presumably comes straight from the film's source novel, by Anne Michaels, and doesn't lend itself to dramatization, despite Dillane's typically intelligent performance.