By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Growing up in Chicago, Shabbat was not a day of prayer and rest, but for going to the movies. Every Saturday I trundled over to the neighborhood theatre and watched morning screenings of cartoons, capped off with a Flash Gordon episode. After lunch, I’d return for the double feature. I can’t exactly remember what the first Jewish film I ever saw was, but surmise it was either The Colonel and Me (1958) or The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). In high-school I rarely went to the movies because going on the weekends was an occasion for dates, which were few and far between in my case. When girls accepted my awkward invitations, I selected motion pictures that were appropriate for light conversation afterwards like James Bond or Pink Panther films, certainly not The Pawnbroker (1965).
I didn’t take movies seriously until college. Until then, they were simply for entertainment and socializing. Looking back, I realize that Roger Ebert played a role in that process. He began writing his reviews for the Chicago Sun Times, the newspaper I read at home and as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois because my father was a Daley democrat and never subscribed to the conservative Chicago Tribune. Ebert enabled my generation to go beyond the plot of films and understand how their various parts―the acting, the cinematography, the score, and the script―worked together to convey more complex meanings.
Hearing the news of Ebert’s death and watching tributes to him on television enhanced my appreciation for his accomplishments. I struggle every week or other week to write this column which has been confined to reviewing movies with Jewish themes; whereas he churned out several reviews a day on a diverse array of films. Gene Siskel and he elevated film criticism into what it should be: a popular spectator sport. Over the span of his 46 year career, Ebert saw his share of Jewish films. As a homage to him, I’ve excerpted some of his observations. Perhaps it will motivate you to view some of these films again. Remember, save a seat in the balcony for Roger!
Funny Girl (October 18, 1968)
It is impossible to praise Miss Streisand too highly; hard to find much to praise about the rest of the film. She turns out, curiously enough, to be a born movie star. It was her voice that made her famous, and that’s fair enough. But it will be her face and her really splendid comic ability that make her a star. She has the best timing since Mae West, and is more fun to watch than anyone since the young Katharine Hepburn.
Fiddler on the Roof (June 1, 1971)
“Fiddler on the Roof has been around a long time, has become an institution and has added some good songs to our memories. But in the process it’s become so polished, so packaged, so distanced from the real feelings that inspired the original stories of Sholem Aleichem (who didn’t even make it onto the mimeographed list of credits) that it’s become just another pleasant product of American entertainment industrialism. So why do I give it three stars? Because what it does, it does well. It’s just what the public wants; I doubt if they’d like a better “Fiddler” more.
Annie Hall (January 1, 1977)
Annie Hall is a comedy, yes, and there are moments in it as funny as anything Woody has done, but the movie represents a growth on Allen’s part. From a filmmaker who would do anything for a laugh, whose primary mission seemed to be to get through the next five minutes, ….And so there are two Woody Allens here: Our old pal the original Woody, who’s given to making asides directly into the camera, and a new Allen who creates Alvy Singer in his own image and then allows him to behave consistently, even sometimes at the cost of laughs. It’s this new Woody who has the nervous romance, the complicated relationship with the would-be nightclub singer Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton with an interesting mixture of maternal care, genuine love, and absolute craziness).
Chariots of Fire ( January 1, 1981)
“The film is unabashedly and patriotically British in its regard for these two characters, but it also contains sharp jabs at the British class system, which made the Jewish Abrahams feel like an outsider who could sometimes feel the lack of sincerity in a handshake, and placed the Protestant Liddell in the position of having to explain to the peeved Prince of Wales why he could not, in conscience, run on the Sabbath. Both men are essentially proving themselves, their worth, their beliefs, on the track.”
Driving Miss Daisy (January 12, 1990)
“Eventually Miss Daisy agrees to be driven, and eventually, over the years, she and Hoke begin to learn about one another. Neither one is quick to reveal emotion. And although Miss Daisy prides herself on being a Southern Jewish liberal, she is not always very quick to see the connections between such things as an attack on her local synagogue and the Klan’s attacks on black churches. Indeed, much of Hoke’s relationship with her consists of helping her to see certain connections. When she goes to listen to a speech by Martin Luther King, for example, she has Hoke drive her; but although she has an extra ticket, it never occurs to her to invite him to come inside. “Things have changed,” she observes complacently in another scene, referring to race relations in the South, and he replies that they have not changed all that much.”
Avalon (October 19, 1990)
Levinson’s “Avalon” is inspired by the experiences of his own family. His grandparents came to American from Russia, part of a large Jewish family that pooled its resources and brought over one relative after another, until at last the five Krichinsky brothers had all settled in Baltimore. …They worked hard and raised large families and their extended family was the center of their social life. They lived near to one another, and held family councils, and pooled their money for charitable giving and to help out family members in need. And they had glowing ambitions for their children. One parent tells his son he will never tear him how to hang wall paper, because “it is not a job you should grow up to do.” Notes like this are struck with absolute accuracy; I remember my own father refusing to teach me his trade for the same reason. The world of Baltimore in the first half of the century is recreated by the film with an unforced but rich detail. The clothes and cars are just right, of course, but so are the values. We understand how for some of the brothers, especially Gabriel (Lou Jacobi), family traditions are sacred. He objects when one of his brothers moves to the suburbs after the war. He complains that he cannot find the suburbs, that it is too far a drive–but his real complaint is that the family is flying apart and losing its solidarity. This process is dramatized in the film’s central scene, a Thanksgiving dinner where Jacobi and his wife arrive late and the family has already cut the turkey: You cut the turkey without me?
Homicide (October 18, 1991
“Homicide” is about a man waking up to himself. As the movie opens, Detective Bobby Gold, the Mantegna character, is a cop who places his job first and his personal identity last. He does not think much about being Jewish. He gets in a scrape with a superior officer, who is black, and when the officer calls him a “kike,” he is ready to fight – but we sense his anger grows more out of departmental rivalries than a personal sense of insult. Throughout the movie, Mamet’s characters use the bluntest street language in their racial and sexual descriptions, as if somehow getting the ugliness out into the open is progress. …Gold is angry with the doctor because the doctor’s mother got murdered, and the murder resulted in Gold being pulled off the big drug case. The mother, a stubborn old lady, ran a corner store in a black ghetto. She didn’t need the money, but she refused to budge from the store, and she is shot dead in a robbery. Bobby, speeding toward the drug bust with his partner (William H. Macy), happens on the scene of the crime accidentally. “This isn’t my case,” he keeps saying. “I’m not here. You didn’t see me.” But the old woman’s son, who has the clout downtown, wants him assigned to the case. Since Bobby Gold is Jewish, the doctor thinks, maybe he’ll really care. The doctor has the wrong man. What Mamet is trying to do in “Homicide,” I think, is combine the structure of a thriller with the content of a soul-searching conversion process.
Schindler’s List (December 15, 1993)
Here is a man who saw his chance at the beginning of World War II and moved to Nazi-occupied Poland to open a factory and employ Jews at starvation wages. His goal was to become a millionaire. By the end of the war, he had risked his life and spent his fortune to save those Jews and had defrauded the Nazis for months with a munitions factory that never produced a single usable shell. Why did he change? What happened to turn him from a victimizer into a humanitarian? It is to the great credit of Steven Spielberg that his film “Schindler’s List” does not even attempt to answer that question. Any possible answer would be too simple, an insult to the mystery of Schindler’s life. The Holocaust was a vast evil engine set whirling by racism and madness. Schindler outsmarted it, in his own little corner of the war, but he seems to have had no plan, to have improvised out of impulses that remained unclear even to himself. In this movie, the best he has ever made, Spielberg treats the fact of the Holocaust and the miracle of Schindler’s feat without the easy formulas of fiction.
Liberty Heights (Dec.10, 1999)
Baltimore, 1954. Integration is the law of the land, and none too soon for Ben Kurtzman and his best pals, who are freshmen in high school. They regard the sign outside a municipal swimming pool: “No Jews, dogs or colored.” Dogs they understand. They ask themselves why Jews are listed first and decide it’s because “you never see any colored at the beach, so it must be directed mainly at Jews.” Not deep analytical thinking, but they are distracted by the girls on the other side of the chain-link fence, their plump bits displayed in frilly bathing suits. This will be a year of discovery for Ben, and by the time it is over, he will understand more about Negroes, Jews, segregation and himself.
The Believer (June 14, 2002)
For Danny, anti-Semitism and the self-hate it implies is the whole point; he is uninterested in the politics of fascism. For Danny, the weakness of Jews is what he sees as their willingness to be victims, and after a court assigns him to an encounter group with Holocaust survivors, he bluntly asks one why he didn’t fight back. Israelis, he believes, are not Jews because they own their own land and defend it, and therefore have transcended their Jewishness. You can see this reasoning twisting back into his own unhappy soul; he objects to Abraham taking instructions from God, and he objects to taking instructions from his church. His values involve his muscles, his fighting ability (both physical and rhetorical), his willingness to confront. In some kind of sick way, he attacks Jews hoping to inspire one to beat him up.
Bee Season (November 11, 2005)
The father teaches Judaism and follows its forms, but his spiritual life is academic, not mystical. What no one in the family perceives is that Eliza is a genuine mystic, for whom the Kabbalah is not a theory but a reality. One of the things that Kabbalah believes is that words not only reflect reality, but in a sense create it. God and the name of God are in this way the same thing. How could this association enter into the life of a 12-year-old in a practical way? Eliza finds out when she enters a spelling bee. Because she exists in the same world with words, because words create her world, she doesn’t need to “know” how to spell a word. It needs merely to be evoked, and it materializes in a kind of vision: “I see the words.” Although this gift gets her into the national finals, “Bee Season” is not a movie about spelling bees. It is a movie about a spiritual choice that calls everyone’s bluff.”
A Serious Man (October 7, 2009)
It is set in what I assume to be a Minneapolis suburb of their childhood, a prairie populated by split-level homes with big garages but not enough trees around them. In this world, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) earnestly desires to be taken as a serious man and do the right thing, but does God take him seriously? “I read the book of Job last night,” Virginia Woolf said. “I don’t think God comes out well in it.” Someone up there doesn’t like Larry Gopnik. Beginning with a darkly comic prologue in Yiddish, “A Serious Man” inhabits a Jewish community where the rational (physics) is rendered irrelevant by the mystical (fate). Gopnik can fill all the blackboards he wants, and it won’t do him any good. Maybe because an ancestor invited a dybbuk to cross his threshold, Larry is cursed. A dybbuk is the wandering soul of a dead person. You don’t want to make the mistake of inviting one into your home. You don’t have to be Jewish to figure that out.
Footnote (March 14, 2012)
When I describe “Footnote,” you may conclude that it offers little for you. In fact, it’s one of the smartest and most merciless comedies to come along in a while. It centers on an area of fairly narrow interest, but in its study of human nature, it is deep and takes no prisoners. Two main characters: The father has devoted his life to scratching out minute inconsistencies in various versions of the Talmud. His son is a great popularizer of Judaic lore, whose books are best-sellers and whose face is often on television. Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba), the father, has labored for years without much recognition. He takes great pride in once having been mentioned in a footnote of a book by a legendary scholar. Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), the son, is one of those facile popularizers to whom everything comes easily. The film opens in a teeth-grating ceremony where the son is receiving a prestigious prize, and his father is seated stony-faced in the audience. Uriel goes out of his way to praise the old man, but this serves only to reflect on the old man’s obscurity, and Eliezer knows it. All of this leads up to a masterful series of ethical dilemmas in the film’s last half. The Talmud provides guidance to Jews about how to lead their lives, but these two Jews have learned nothing that helps them when they find themselves in an impossible situation.
*
Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com