Lena Dunham & Stephen Fry in Holocaust Dramedy – The Hollywood Reporter

Lena Dunham (proper) and Stephen Fry in ‘Treasure.’

Anne Wilk

Set in 1991, not lengthy after it immediately turned a lot simpler for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to go to websites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-French co-production Treasure follows a father and daughter (performed by Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham) making precisely this sort of voyage of remembrance. It’s tailored from the comic-tragic novel Too Many Males by Australian Lily Brett, and directed by German director Julia von Heinz, whose well-regarded earlier two movies (Nothing Else Issues and And Tomorrow the Whole World) additionally discover the aftermath of the Holocaust on later generations. So, as a bundle, Treasure would appear gifted with the uncooked materials wanted to make a compelling, inherently attention-grabbing work.

Alas, the movie is a clumsy, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would name it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s exhausting to carry out an evidential postmortem, based mostly strictly on one viewing, of the place all of it goes improper. One can see the skeleton of a workable, doubtlessly sturdy script, credited to von Heinz and her husband-collaborator John Quester, which finds comedy within the mismatched temperaments and needs of the 2 principal characters.

Genial, convivial Edek Rothwax (Fry) will need to have been a younger man when he managed to make it out of Birkenau alive and left along with his spouse, who within the movie has now been lifeless a 12 months. Like many survivors of his era, Edek simply desires to let the previous keep buried and dwell within the current. His anxiety-ridden, trauma-freighting daughter Ruth (Dunham), then again, a music journalist who, as Edek retains telling everybody, as soon as interviewed the Rolling Stones, desperately desires to hook up with her household’s tragic historical past. It was her concept that they make this journey to Poland to see the homes the place Edek and his late spouse grew up in Lodz, the manufacturing facility that his household as soon as owned, after which Auschwitz-Birkenau itself.

Naturally, the 2 of them are bickering from the second the airplane lands in Warsaw. Controlling Ruth seethes when Edek shuns the practice tickets she’s pre-paid for — given his historical past, he unsurprisingly has a factor about trains — and as an alternative makes mates with an affable cab driver, Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), who agrees to be their chauffeur for the entire journey.

I confess I’ve not learn Brett’s guide, however judging by what I can collect about it, a number of the friction between the 2 principal characters stems from the best way Edek, who can converse fluent if rusty Polish, will get together with the locals whereas Ruth sees nothing however smiling anti-Semites throughout her. It’s straightforward to think about that this could have labored onscreen too, however as an alternative one thing has gone awry with the rendering of the characters, as if the filmmakers and forged have been afraid of constructing Ruth too unlikeable. So as an alternative, there’s a heavy emphasis right here on Ruth’s trauma, her bulimia and physique points. (True to the shape she established on Women, Dunham is unafraid to get semi-naked for the digicam — you go, lady! Flash that flesh such as you don’t give a f–okay!) She has a bizarre have to spray cash at each Polish individual she meets, be they a poor market stallholder promoting pigs’ toes or the descendants of the Poles who took possession of Edek’s household condominium (who promote again to her, at extremely inflated costs, issues Edek remembers belonging to his household).

As performed right here, Edek is equally a muddle of contradictory impulses: He’s beneficiant and pleasant one minute to each Pole he meets, then immediately bizarrely protecting of Ruth and upset that she uncovered herself to threat by going alone with a younger male translator to fulfill the residents of his previous home.

In fact characters, similar to folks in actual life, generally is a mass of contradictions. However by some means that complexity, that means to comprise fully opposed emotions directly, simply doesn’t come throughout in Fry’s efficiency, simply as Ruth’s contrariness feels gestural, poorly limned in Dunham’s. Nevertheless a lot all of us love Fry, a licensed nationwide treasure within the U.Ok., he’s by no means been an actor with a lot vary, and he’s just about at his restrict right here. Admittedly, it’s deeply admirable that he put within the time to study Polish effectively sufficient to talk a substantial quantity all through the movie. However on condition that Edek moved to New York after the battle, wouldn’t he have a New York accent in English as an alternative of sounding like a British Pole from South Kensington?  

It’s straightforward to get obsessive about these quibbles as a result of it’s so exhausting to establish the place all of it goes improper in Treasure. The supporting forged provide completely serviceable performances that serve the script’s clear purpose to evoke the disgrace many Poles really feel concerning the Holocaust, the widespread want to not converse of it. And naturally there’s the pervasive worry within the early Nineteen Nineties that Jews would, rightly, come again and declare the property that was seized from their households. The manufacturing design and costume departments get the appear and feel of early 90s post-Communist tackiness all the way down to probably the most microcosmic degree, from the mullet haircuts on the lads to the brass palm crops within the resort rooms and the best way everybody smoked in all places in these days.

In some way poor casting and weak path handle to flub a really promising premise, one which feels well timed within the mild of present debates round Jewish identification. It gained’t assist that Treasure is premiering on the pageant circuit so quickly after Jesse Eisenberg’s very equally themed A Actual Ache debuted in Sundance, successful sturdy acclaim. However the world ought to be large enough to comprise multiple movie about Jews revisiting the previous nation and feeling every kind of feels. It’s only a disgrace this isn’t a greater tackle the fabric.