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Movies

'Jakob the Liar': Good morning, Poland!

September 27, 1999
Web posted at: 1:42 p.m. EDT (1742 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- If you want to score a quick tear -- or a quick buck -- in the entertainment business, there's no more precise audience sucker punch than the dual themes of hope and human dignity.

From the overripe Bette Midler honeydews of "From a Distance" and "Wind Beneath My Wings" to Celine Dion's aerobicized cardiovascular system "going on" (and on) during "Titanic"-mania, all you need is a soaring, easy-to-grasp concept that makes your bedraggled audience feel inexplicably heroic.

  VIDEO
Theatrical preview for "Jakob the Liar"
Windows Media 28K 80K
 

The rest is handled by the messenger, the super-rich conduit who not only sees things more clearly than you and I can, but also can put voice to our proletarian dreams and desires. If the message runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, something "deep" and "meaningful" has been accomplished. Surely, we think, a plea this moving can't be show business.

Well, yes it can, and it frequently is. And there's not an actor in Hollywood who's ridden this particular wave to more unjustified acclaim than Robin Williams.

Life after 'Garp'

It honestly bothers me to bad-mouth the guy, because he seems to be sincere in his sloppy emotionalism, and he definitely has talent. Williams has risen from the specter of lifelong typecasting as Mork (of the 1978-'82 sitcom "Mork & Mindy") to a career that allows him to slide between comic and dramatic roles with an ease surpassed only by Tom Hanks. And that's saying something.

But after the 1989 mega-success of "Dead Poets Society" -- its three-word message: "Seize the day" -- Williams persistently has lifted the weight of the world onto his hairy shoulders, shed a glistening tear and freed our souls through the power of warm, fuzzy laughter.

He leans toward the kind of runny-yolk scripts that were getting hoary back when Charlie Chaplin finally hung up the Little Tramp. And Chaplin was a true genius, not just a quick, funny actor randomly shouting out everything in his head on talk shows.

Last year's "Patch Adams" is the nadir of Williams' journey, and if it doesn't stay that way there could be rioting. The people who hated it (myself included) hated it. But it still made gobs of money, and no vein is abandoned in the movie industry until all the gold has been retrieved and pounded into Rodeo Drive jewelry.

And now, 'Jakob'

Williams' latest film, "Jakob the Liar" -- in which his character raises the spirits of a Jewish ghetto's inhabitants during World War II -- isn't a willfully blind piece of meringue like Roberto Benigni's 1997 "Life Is Beautiful." But it's not exactly complex, either.

Hitler's SS troops really did round up human beings like animals and kill them in the streets, everybody. You can't make the pain or far-reaching ramifications of that go away through a populist healing gesture on the level of "I Want To Hold Your Hand." Unless, of course, the population is willing to keep it very, very simple.

Since this isn't "Life Is Beautiful 2," Benigni comparisons are something of a low blow. "Jakob the Liar" was ready for release right around the time that Benigni's film came out. The producers held it back to avoid comparisons. But let's be realistic here. How can you not compare two films in which, among other things, the central character tries to protect a child from Nazi abominations through the spiritual equivalent of a shadow puppet?

Radio gaga

Williams talks softly and carries some big shtick as Jakob. He's a former café owner who's forced to invent optimistic wartime radio reports to keep his fellow ghetto-dwellers from killing themselves in despair.

The biggest problem here is that the film, in addition to being thoroughly unbelievable, is monotonous as all get-out. Writer-director Peter Kassovitz -- basing the film on Jurek Becker's 1969 book -- deals more openly with Nazi atrocities in the first three minutes of the film than Benigni could manage in two hours of Harpo Marxism. But Kassovitz has access to Robin Williams, and you can't expect anybody to dwell on dangling corpses when your star is the next best thing to a divine savior.

Jakob overhears a radio report saying that the Russians are just 400 kilometers away, and that hope of a rescue starts spreading when he tells his friends what he's heard. Through the inaccurate gossip grapevine, the story evolves into Jakob actually having a forbidden radio hidden away somewhere. This transforms him into a ghetto celebrity, albeit one who could possibly be executed by Nazis for possession of something he doesn't really own.

One of the more respected members of the Jewish community (Armin Müller-Stahl) persuades Jakob to keep issuing false reports because the suicide rate has fallen spectacularly since his initial story. So Jakob keeps relaying false messages, and things get predictably "uplifting" from there.

There's a poorly interwoven subplot in which Jakob houses a little girl (Hannah Taylor Gordon) who sneaks into town for shelter after she escapes a train full of doomed Jews. In the most ridiculous scene in the film, Jakob stands behind the big-eyed girl and issues a pretend radio report that features Winston Churchill speaking in Polish. Jakob talks into some kitchenware to generate the properly tinny sound. Apparently, the endless strain of living under a fascist regime renders children stupid.

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None of the performances is bad, really. There's just a general aura of Hollywood-ness that permanently snuffs any hope of plausibility.

Alan Arkin does his Alan Arkin business with gusto, although he doesn't have much of a role. And Liev Schreiber is fine as a young, not very bright hothead.

But Williams' sequences with Bob Balaban (as an ornery barber friend who's been giving Jakob free haircuts since the occupation) play like "Waiting for Godot" crossed with a perverse Catskills routine. Call it "Waiting for Video."


"Jakob the Liar" isn't a cakewalk, but you only see enough real horror to understand that it's possible. You see a group of men who've been hanged, plus some forced labor and a couple of shootings. It's all very PG-13. 114 minutes.


RELATED STORIES:
Miramax releases English dub of 'Life Is Beautiful'
August 26, 1999
Review: Sick humor in 'Patch Adams'
January 4, 1999
Roberto Benigni defends 'Life' as 'real love story'
November 9, 1998

RELATED SITES:
Official 'Jakob the Liar' site
Sony Pictures Movies
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