Based on poet Anne Michaels' acclaimed first novel, Jeremy Podeswa's film revolves around a Holocaust survivor defined by the crushing weight of memory, which both tethers him to the raw grief of losing his family and inspired him to find his purpose as a writer.
Like the book, Canadian director Podeswa's film glides back and forth between the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Poland, 1940: Nine-year-old Jakob Beer (Robbie Kay) sees Nazi soldiers murder his parents and abduct his beloved older sister, budding musician Bella (Nina Dobrev). Jakob flees into the nearby woods and is found by Greek archeologist Athos Roussos (Rade Sherbedgia), part of a team excavating the ruins of an Iron-age town in nearby Biskupin. Unable to abandon Jakob to his fate, Athos smuggles the child across the border and takes him to his hometown on the occupied island of Zakynthos. After the war, Athos accepts an invitation to teach in Toronto and moves to Canada with Jakob; the child is drawn to fellow survivors Jozef and Sara (Diego Matamoros, Sarah Orenstein) and, later, their Canadian-born son, Ben. Athos, meanwhile, channels his wartime experiences into an academic examination of the manipulation of hi story. In the 1960s, Athos is dead and Jakob (Stephen Dillane) is in college, still living in the apartment they once shared and providing bookish teenager Ben (Devon Bostick) with a refuge from his father's deepening depression. A loner obsessed with preserving the legacy of Holocaust victims – the fugitive pieces of their lives and deaths, as well as his own -- Jakob forges a promising but unsuccessful relationship with spirited, outgoing fellow student Alex (Rosamund Pike), later finding a more like-minded lover in Israeli museum curator Michaela (Ayelet Zurer).
Michaels' evocative use of language – its poetry -- is inevitably lost in the transition from page to screen and viewers invested in the pop-culture rhetoric of self-help, closure and positive thinking may have trouble warming to Jakob; his relentless determination to live among ghosts is both choice and compulsion, countered but never ameliorated by Athos' gentle admonition that "the miracle of wood isn't that it burns; it's that it floats." Podeswa's film, which focuses on Jakob's story (the second half of Michaels' book is devoted to the grown Ben) is respectful but stolid; his use of non-linear editing to suggest the way past and present coexist in Jakob's mind is defeated by the literalness of images. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
