It's been a few hours since I watched Jakob The Liar, the supposed "dramedy" starring Robin Williams as Jakob Heym, a Jewish cafe owner who, along with other Jews, was held in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944 - and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. "Disturbed" sorta works, though.
THE STORY (WARNING: **spoilers contained below**)
As he sits at the foot of a tree that has sentimental value for him and his dead wife, a piece of newspaper floats by, Forrest Gump-like, setting up a chain of events that leads him to the local Gestapo office for breaking ("lightly fracturing," actually) curfew. While in the office, Jakob overhears plans, played on the German Commandant's radio, that the Russian Army is advancing on Britannica. News being a precious commodity to a People that have been without it in the Ghetto prison they live in, Jakob shares this info with a few others, and it somehow translates to his friends and eventually the rest of the Ghetto ("You told a barber?") that he has a radio - a dangerous possession for that place and time. Jakob, once heralded for his potato pancakes, finally has some Juice and is treated as The Man for his "possession", but he has to keep up the charade by continually lying about having a radio, as it Keeps Hope Alive for a hopeless situation.
[Under the circumstances, in other reviews, "Wackiness Ensues" would follow that somewhat truncated paragraph - but, how Wacky can you be about a situation as heinous as the Jewish Holocaust? Ahhh, that, my friends, is The Question.]
THE UPSHOT (WARNING: **more spoilers contained below**)
I'll tell you straight: I surprised myself by giving this movie the greenlight [note: since downgraded on second viewing] - because when I left the theater yesterday, I had mixed feelings about what I had seen. Any reviewer (or studio exec, for that matter) who'd label this movie a "comedy," just because it made light (in places) of a grave situation, oughta be summarily Whupped - and I have just the Belt to do so. Whupped, I say, not because the Jewish Holocaust can't be made light of - though it does seem a strange thing to do - but because contrary to popular belief, this film is not Williams' "Good Morning Auschwitz". The comedy that exists are moments of "black humor," spoken, as Jakob implied, because the humor relieves the pain of the situation. Thus, you have Jakob and his friend Kowalsky the Barber (Bob Balaban), constantly at each others throats for the bargain they struck before the Nazis came - namely, that in exchange for a pancake a day from Jakob, Kowalsky will provide Jakob with a daily shave and a haircut, for four years; nothing too unusual about that, except that Jakob still insists Kowalsky keeps his end of the bargain, though Jakob cannot keep his, due to the Nazis cutting off his livelihood. With many such bits of humor being of this type, if you're looking for Funny-Funny-Ha-Ha (as opposed to "damn I'd like to laugh but that sh*t's not funny!") you're in the wrong theater.
So, if it doesn't play as a comedy, does it work as a drama? Well, yes and no. It has moments of incredible clarity and power. One in particular that really stands out for me and is indicative of many such moments in this movie is the poignant relationship between Frankfurter (Alan Arkin), an actor pre-occupation and currently extremely distrustful of anyone who "rocks the boat" - especially Jakob - his daughter, and her boyfriend Mischa (Liev Schreiber), a former boxer who, as Jakob put it, has been punched in the head one too many times. Mischa wants to marry Lina, which upsets Frankfurter because he is totally convinced that they all will be exterminated by the Nazis, and a wedding under those circumstances would be a display of false hope. There is a later scene in the movie that leans toward pulling the sentimental strings, but the more powerful bit came earlier, when Frankfurter and his wife resigned themselves to letting Lina sleep with Mischa, because "the days are so difficult now; let them do what they want with their nights". A scene with as much power comes later in the film, when the esteemed Dr. Kirschbaum (Mueller-Stahl), taken to the Commandant's office to attend to a sick Nazi called "The Liquidator", displays remarkable courage in the face of impending doom. Moments like those are almost negated by the holes in the story (why, for example, does Jakob have such a spacious house/apartment, but he's the only one living there - when in almost every other house, people are stacked on top of each other? In such a community, wouldn't he be shamed, even forced, into sharing his "wealth"?), and by the going-nowhere relationship between Jakob and Lina (Taylor-Gordon), a little girl that found Jakob after she escaped from one of the trains taking her family to the death camps. After they broke back in to the Ghetto, he hid her in his attic (he'd be severely punished for having her there if the Germans found out) - but except for giving him someone to play against, there seemed to be no need for this relationship; it just didn't work for me.
So, why'd I greenlight this film [originally]? Good question. The answer, I think, comes in the strangest of places, considering the time and setting of this film: the Black Factor.
THE "BLACK FACTOR" [ObDisclaimer: We Are Not A Monolith]
When all is said and done, when you look at the past, Jews and American Blacks have a lot in common; specifically, Our Holocausts. I don't intend on getting into an Our-Suffering-Was-Worse-Than-Yours dialectic here, but it's pretty clear to me that a common thread between Our Peoples such as the Jewish Holocaust, and the Western Slave Trade, could serve as a means of achieving some Understanding. That it's seen instead as a divisive issue, is a damn shame. I can't speak for Us, but everytime the characters spoke of "The Ghetto", I could Feel their pain, if only in a minute way. And in the end, that's what made the movie work for me; the radio was just background noise.
BAMMER'S BOTTOM LINE
This rendition of Robin Williams isn't Morkian; indeed, when Jakob Cracks Funny, the "laughter" one hears is more brittle than jolly, so if you go into the theater looking for Robert Benini's alter-ego, you'll be disappointed. But if you can ignore the strange end scene, you might come away from the theater a little more "aware" than you were when you came in. "Dramedy" label aside, "Jakob" is a somber reminder of how precious freedom is - and how dangerous it can be to take it for granted.
JAKOB THE LIAR
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