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.

FUGITIVE PIECES (2008) B-

Sandy rated this movie A, in part because of it's depiction of sensitive and real people. My view is that It's one more movie about Holocaust survivors who are forced to live with the traumas they endured under Hitler . . . for the rest of their lives.

In this situation, a survivor, who is a literary light, is severely depressed and meets a special women . . . they have a child, he miraculously becomes un-depressed (with no talk or drug therapy) and they live happily ever after on a Greek Island in the beautiful Aegean Sea.

What struck me while I was watching was that here was one more film that is part of the strategy to never allow the story of the Holocaust to disappear. The thinking is that if we tell the story over and over (i.e. Schindler's List), future Holocausts have a smaller chance of happening again.

Unfortunately, I believe that this approach to understanding man's inhumanity to man . . and eliminating it . . . is a total failure. Either humanity has to create a program to understand this problem, and eliminate it, or live with Holocausts till the end of time. It is our choice. I think it is a more important issue than high oil prices.