In the opening scenes of Jeremy Podeswa's adaptation of Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces, a young boy hides in his house in Poland in 1942, and through the cracks in the baseboard, he watches Nazis kill his parents and abduct his sister. Throughout the film, Podeswa cuts back and forth between the story of how that little boy survived the war and how as an adult (played by Stephen Dillane) he tries to make a new life for himself in Canada as an author and professor. Yet even as Dillane is living in a well-appointed home with lovely young social butterfly Rosamund Pike, he still takes a worm's-eye view of life, always peering through the cracks.
By and large, Fugitive Pieces is a familiar Holocaust survivor's tale, in that it's about a group of people—Dillane and the remaining people he knows from back home—who are so scarred by their memory of want and loss that they resent those who take simple things like apples for granted. What distinguishes this particular story is the specific neuroses of Dillane's character: a man who didn't have it nearly as rough as some of his fellow Polish Jews, and so can sympathize both with those who made it through the camps, and with the seemingly ungrateful generation conceived after the war. Dillane deals with his multiple sensitivities by diving into his writing, and purging his angst on the page in acclaimed books. It takes a succession of helpful women—mother-figures and girlfriends, mainly—to get him to stop internalizing the negativity of the world and start generating something positive of his own.
Fugitive Pieces is a lush-looking film, and the changes Dillane goes through are touching and even uplifting—but those payoffs come late, and only after a lot of quiet, torturous soul-searching that doesn't convey well onscreen. There's very little dynamic to the film. During the war, Dillane's character is hungry, but he's still living in a lovingly lit home on a gorgeous Greek island; after he travels to Canada, he mostly moves from one warm room to another, sharing company with intellectuals and idealists. Podeswa doesn't introduce enough contrast between want and abundance, and while he has a handle on what camera angles best express his protagonists' point of view, he rarely varies the scenery. In many ways, Fugitive Pieces is a beautiful film. But it's a bit too beautiful.
A.V. Club Rating: B-
- Comments