"Thank you for listening."

In the opening moments of Robert Redford's wonderful new film The Company You Keep, a middle aged woman pulls into a rural New York gas station, where she is immediately encircled by police cars and arrested by the FBI. Although she looks like an ordinary suburban matron, it turns out that this seemingly respectable person is actually "Sharon Solarz," a member of the Weather Underground who has succeeded in living below the radar for almost 30 years.

Frazzled editor "Ray Fuller" (Stanley Tucci) assigns the story to "Ben Shepard" (Shia LaBeouf), an ambitious young reporter with minimal knowledge of the Sixties and no sympathy for Solarz whatsoever. But something in the first article Ben writes sparks Sharon's interest, and she asks to see him. Hoping she will reveal useful information during the interview, the FBI agrees. And that's how we come to see Susan Sarandon, pale and drawn under harsh lights in an ugly orange jumpsuit, deliver one of the greatest performances of her distinguished career.

Calm and composed even while shackled to a table, Sharon speaks forcefully, and Ben finds the intensity of her commitment deeply moving. "Thank you for speaking with me," says Ben with genuine emotion when their time is up. "Thank you for listening," Sharon replies, and her presence resonates throughout the entire film, even though Ben never sees her again and neither do we.

Director Robert Redford has cast himself as attorney "Jim Grant" who is actually "Nick Sloan," another Weather Underground fugitive caught up in the mayhem unleashed by Sharon's arrest. The actual plot of The Company You Keep revolves around Ben's attempt to located Jim/Nick, as he goes on the run seeking aid and comfort from numerous compatriots all played in short sharp scenes by venerable Baby Boomers like Julie Christie, Richard Jenkins, and Nick Nolte. But what really follows is a two hour battle for the soul of Ben Shepard, who tracks Jim/Nick in good faith, as a reporter, without realizing that the FBI now has him under surveillance too.

Chicago, of course, occupies a special place in the mythology of the Sixties, beginning with the Democratic Convention in 1968 (and the subsequent trial of "The Chicago Seven"), and continuing right up through the 2008 Presidential campaign (when Barack Obama's relationship with his Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers, who was one of the founders of the Weather Underground, became a subject of intense interest on Fox News).

Redford is no fool, so I am sure he took this project on expecting negative blowback, nevertheless, The Company You Keep is a profoundly optimistic film. The film I saw was not about the past, it was about the future. Much like "you are what you eat," the phrase "the company you keep" is presented as a moral challenge, and by the end Ben Shepard has made his choice.

The Company You Keep opens in Metro Chicago today at the Landmark Century in Lincoln Park and the CineArts in Evanston.

 
Photo Credits: Doane Gregory/Sony Pictures Classics

ADDENDUM: FROM PAGE TO SCREEN

As is my way, I saw The Company You Keep at a preview screening, then I read the novel, then I saw the film a second time before writing this review. (I try to do this every time I want to write a serious review of a literary adaptation.)

Conventional Wisdom says "the movie is never as good as the book," but this is one case where CW is simply wrong. Neil Gordon's novel is OK (too many characters, too many coincidences, too much melodrama), but Robert Redford's film is very powerful. Working closely with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, Redford has extracted the best elements of Gordon's novel, and added some essential connective tissue. In Redford's hands, a story about the past becomes a catalyst for the future.

All of which is fine with me, except for one thing: where are the Jews?

Ironically, all of the names novelist Neil Gordon gave to his huge cast of characters (Jed Lewis, Mimi Lurie, Henry Osborne, Sharon Solarz, etc) have all stayed the same except for three: reporter Ben Shepard (known in the novel as Ben Schulberg), and the Sloan Brothers (known in the film as Nick Sloan and Daniel Sloan, but known in the novel as Jason Sinai and Daniel Sinai). So on the page, both of the protagonists-Ben Schulberg and Jim Grant/Jason Sinai-are clearly Jewish, but you would never know that if you had only met their onscreen counterparts.

And you know they are Jewish not only from their names, and from their face-to-face conversations, but also from their backstories, especially the Jim Grant/Jason Sinai backstory. In Gordon's novel, Jason Sinai is the son of a prominent Jewish labor lawyer, and when he goes on the run, the first place he heads is Lower Manhattan. He opens a hidden safe in his father's office, and finds not only cash (which he expects), but also updated IDs with photographs of his brother's aging face replacing his own (which he does not expect but clearly finds extremely useful). In other words, the Sinai family has neither seen nor heard from Jason for thirty years, but they have always prepared for a time when he might suddenly reach out to them in a crisis. And when that day finally comes, he has their full support.

Several years ago, when I interviewed screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (a good Jewish girl from New Jersey) about her adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, I asked her why the two main characters, Andy and Miranda, identified as Jewish in Lauren Weisberger's novel, were no longer Jewish onscreen. She said: "We were trying to streamline the book and we had a lot of stuff to deal with, with both Andy and Miranda, and it didn't seem like that was a part of it."

I can accept that explanation for The Devil Wears Prada, but I don't think it's appropriate in the case of The Company You Keep. Most of the leaders of the Weather Underground and its parent organization SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were Jewish. So I agree with activist Mark Rudd when he says: "I do believe that the revolt of Jewish youth in the New Left of the sixties and seventies deserves to be studied and honored as an important chapter in the history of American Jews."

According to Rudd: "…two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish; a majority of the steering committee of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement were Jewish; the SDS chapters at Columbia and the University of Michigan were more than half Jewish; at Kent State in Ohio, where only 5 percent of the student body was Jewish, three of the four students shot by the National Guard in May, 1970 were Jewish… This was only twenty years after the end of World War II, and World War II and the Holocaust were our fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans."

Please note that this is definitely an asymmetrical relationship: most Jewish students were not radical activists; nevertheless, most radical activists were Jewish. If that fact is an indisputable part of the history of the Sixties, why leave it out?

Maybe transforming himself from someone named "Jason Sinai" into someone named "Nick Sloan" is OK for Redford. After all, when we see him on screen, many of us will always see him in our mind's eye as "Hubbell Gardner" in The Way We Were. But I wish Redford had kept the name "Ben Schulberg" for his foil instead of making him "Ben Shepard." Shia LaBeouf is one of the most promising young Jewish actors on today's scene, so all of this is part of the "baggage" that the real Shia LaBeouf now carries with him. My hope is that he has more chances to explore this legacy-on our behalf-in the future.

"Thank you for listening."

Here is a new definition of chutzpah: Dying on the day that a documentary film based on your life is scheduled for release in your own home town!

But it gets even better. In 2008, Ed Koch, the third of New York City's four Jewish mayors (to date), purchased a burial plot in Manhattan's Trinity Cemetery, and then he designed his own headstone to include these words: 

"My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish."

Daniel Pearl, 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim Terrorist. 

He had these words carved right above the Sh'ma. And then, on February 1, 2013, exactly eleven years after Daniel Pearl's brutal murder in Pakistan on February 1, 2002, Ed Koch died in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 88. Oh yes, this man really knew how to put on a show!

 Koch is a marvelous documentary: well-researched and informative, yet playful and irreverent. Director Neil Barsky, making his filmmaking debut, worked as a reporter for years (first at the New York Daily News and then at Wall Street Journal) before moving over to Wall Street (first as an analyst and then as a hedge fund manager). So Barsky knows my own favorite maxim in his bones: "Follow the money."

Following the money leads Barsky to credit Koch with transforming Times Square from a dingy peephole paradise into a blazing commercial district lit anew each night by some of the brightest lights on the planet. But Koch didn't just dispense dollars downtown, he also funneled profits from the booming financial district back into all five boroughs.

Using news footage and a huge inventory of still photographs (beautifully assembled by editor Juliet Weber), Barsky shows exactly what the New York Times describes in its very long obituary : "Koch began one of the city's most ambitious housing programs, which continued after he left office and eventually built or rehabilitated more than 200,000 housing units, revitalizing once-forlorn neighborhoods."

As we watch President Obama and members of the 113th Congress debate public sector investment and the role of "Big Government," this is all quite timely. Ed Koch was clearly a man committed to using his power as mayor to improve the lives of real people from every walk of life "east side, west side, all around the town." Unfortunately, however, Koch is so focused on what happened within the five boroughs that a non-New Yorker is left feeling Barsky has only told part of a much larger story.

Start here: Where did all the money come from? Barsky provides hints, but then he never fully explores them. Elected to Congress in 1969, Ed Koch spent almost a decade in Washington, DC as a member of the House of Representatives. He didn't resign until the very end of 1977 (just in time to begin his first term as mayor). Quoting from the New York Times obituary again, during his time in Congress, Koch "became known as a hard-working, independent liberal able to work with conservatives. He co-sponsored a law that gave citizens access to their government files and introduced legislation for a national commission on drug abuse. He supported public transportation and housing, Social Security and tax reform, home health care for the elderly, aid to Israel, amnesty for draft resisters, solar energy research, federal financing of abortions and consumer protection measures." My guess is that many of his DC colleagues were still on hand to approve the huge loan guarantees authorized by Congress once New York City's new mayor was in office.

Barsky also tiptoes around Ed Koch's relationship with the African-American community. Much is made in the film itself of Koch's decision to close the Sydenham Hospital in Harlem during his first-term, but I think there's more to it than that. Although Barsky mentions that Koch went down to Mississippi during "Freedom Summer" in 1964, he doesn't tell us how that might have affected Koch later, especially when Jesse Jackson included support for a Palestinian state as one of his platform points when he ran for President in 1984.

Let me be blunt here: When Jackson made his  infamous "Hymietown" comment, exactly who did he have in mind? ("That's all Hymie wants to talk about, is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that's all they want to talk about.") Reading  what Koch wrote  about his trip to Mississippi for the Village Voice in 1964, it's easy to imagine that he took Jackson's 1984 remark quite personally and reacted accordingly, not only in 1984 but when Jackson ran a second time in 1988.

My point is that New Yorkers like Barsky may well define Ed Koch as a New Yorker, but the quote from Daniel Pearl on his headstone indicates to me that Ed Koch wanted to be remembered as more than just a three-term mayor of New York City. My guess is that the man himself wanted to be known as someone who played not just on our national stage, but also on the world stage as well.

Koch opens this Friday (March 15) at the Music Box Theatre in Andersonville, and I definitely think you should see it, not because it's a perfect film, but because Ed Koch, in his all-too-human complexity, lived an exemplary Jewish-American life. Click here for times and tickets.

Note that one of Ed Koch's final gigs was hosting the web series "Mayor at the Movies." You can still watch him doing his reviews online, but right now, I'm taking the liberty of rating this film for him:

PS: Four Jewish mayors of New York? Yes. The first was Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Although he was raised as an Episcopalian, La Guardia's mother was a Jew from Hungary and he spoke Yiddish on the campaign trail. The second was Abraham Beame who served as mayor from 1974 to 1977 (when he was defeated by Ed Koch). Michael Bloomberg, the current incumbent, was elected in 2001 and is in the final year of his third term.

After an extraordinary run of Oscar nominations for narrative features in the Best Foreign Language Film category (Beaufort in 2008, Waltz with Bashir in 2009, Ajami in 2010, and Footnote in 2012), this year two of the five Best Documentary slots are filled by films from Israel. The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras couldn't be more different, but taken together they are a tribute to the vitality of Israeli democracy, still vibrant despite all the obstacles.

The Gatekeepers are the six men who have lead Israel's Secret Service (the Shin Bet) in the era of Occupation: Avraham Shalom (1980-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1995), Carmi Gillon (1994-1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), and Avi Dichter (2000-2005).

Composite of The Gatekeepers. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Filmmaker Dror Moreh had the audacity to ask them to appear in extended on camera interviews, and to their credit, they all said yes. Aided by Oron Adar, his extraordinary editor, Moreh weaves their stories together into a seamless whole that is both fascinating and heart-breaking. If you are seeking easy answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you will find none here. There is no black and white in The Gatekeepers, just lots of gray in every possible gradation. These are men of action, war heroes and highly decorated veterans, and yet, speaking to Moreh's camera, they are all thoughtful and reflective, as if, independently, they have also been seeking an answer to the exact question he is asking: how did all our lofty dreams of statehood come to this?

The oldest of them, Avraham Shalom, looks like a kindly zayde but he has been in the battle from the beginning. He fought with the Palmach and was a member of the team that brought Adolf Eichmann to justice. But in The Gatekeepers, describing how the field of operations changed after the great "6 Day War" victory of 1967, Shalom takes on the voice of someone telling bedtime stories to children. The rabbits went underground, he says; the dogs run around sniffing the air and tripping over each other trying to find them, but the rabbits have disappeared.

Members of the Shin Bet study Arabic; they learn to "read between the lines;" they visit towns and villages and try to build bridges. After decades of strife, a moment of hope… and then catastrophe. "He changed history," says Carmi Gillon, with a despair that knows no bottom. Who is Gillon talking about? By this point we have seen dozens of famous and infamous people on screen, but it turns out that Gillon is referring to someone whose face is almost never seen and whose name is barely known here in America.

For Gillon, the man who "changed history" was Yigal Amir, the twenty-five year old student from Bar-Ilan University who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. And now, almost two decades later, Moreh's clear implication is that Israel has yet to recover from this grievous injury to the body politic. It is not what they (the Palestinians and the Arabs) have done to us (to Israel and to the Jewish people) that causes Moreh the most pain; it is what we have done to ourselves.

The Gatekeepers is dry, analytical, and scrupulously balanced (some might even say "balanced" to a fault); 5 Broken Cameras, on the other hand, shamelessly bypasses the brain and takes aim directly at the heart.

Gibreel at 5. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.

5 Broken Cameras presents itself as the straightforward story of an ordinary Palestinian man named Emad Burnat, who provides continuous first-person narration. Burnat and his wife Soraya have four sons: Mohammad (born in 1995), Yasin (born in 1998), Taki-Ydin (born in 2000), and Gibreel (born in 2005). "Each boy is a phase of our lives. Each boy experiences a different childhood."

The film is structured around birthday parties for Gibreel, from age one to age five. Burnat tells us that it is Gibreel's birth (in February '05) which prompts him to acquire the first of his many cameras, and every year, Burnat dutifully records Gibreel blowing out a new set of candles. But in counterpoint to that happy moment, Burnat also records life in the village of Bil'in: bulldozers arrive to clear the surrounding hills; construction workers build new apartment towers for the expanding population of Modi'in Illit; Israeli soldiers multiply to enforce the separation barrier in between. ("The first day the bulldozers come is very hard for me…")

Every Friday afternoon after prayers the men of Bil'in march, protesting their ever-deteriorating circumstances. And Israeli peace activists march with them, and soon supporters also flock to Bil'in from all around the world. ("They bring creative ideas to our protest.") Burnat's first camera, the one he said he got for personal use, is destroyed by an exploding tear gas canister. ("In order to keep filming, my friend Yisrael gives me a camera.")

"Now that Gibreel is old enough to understand, he comes to see the demonstration," says Burnat in his relentless narration. "Old enough to understand what?" I ask myself, and I realize I am already beginning to grow skeptical. Back home again, Burnat films Soraya washing Gibreel in the tub. "I wasn't afraid," says the toddler. "If there is gas, just smell the onion," responds the mother with pride. "You are a hero." Commenting on this intimate scene, Burnat worries about burns. "I hope he will develop a thick skin fast," says Burnat in his voiceover.

The skeptical voice in my head is now very loud: "What father takes a toddler to a potentially violent protest march?" Inevitably someone eventually dies in a melee, and Gibreel is there watching. "Daddy," he says once they are back home, "why don't you kill the soldiers with a knife?" "We all lose our childhood at some point," intones Burnat in his somber voiceover.

After 90 minutes, the credits finally roll and I'm aghast. We can debate the wisdom of the settlements (as "the Gatekeepers" clearly do) and we can certainly have empathy for ordinary Palestinians who just want to live their lives in peace. But what I just saw was a film about parents deliberately transforming their newborn son into a vengeful Jihadist. Can this propaganda really be a candidate for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category?

Worse yet, it takes mere minutes to learn that the whole thing is a fake. "I have no job or fixed income. Like the rest of the villagers, I live off the land," says Burnat in his voiceover. Yes there are one or two shots of his elderly father sprinkling some seeds around by hand, but we never see Burnat do any actual farming. One fall day, Burnat takes Soraya and the boys out to "harvest olives," but it looks like an excursion. Is this what pays for their home, where Soraya cooks meals for her family in a kitchen that looks much like my own?

I read interviews with Burnat in which I learn that his footage has been shown on television, on Al Jazeera and elsewhere. In the online press kit, Burnat is described as a "Palestinian farmer," but the bio goes on to include "freelance cameraman and photographer." Cameras 2 through 6 were all provided by Israeli peace activists, and the film's voiceover narration was written for Burnat by his Israeli co-director Guy Davidi (someone who never actually appears in the film itself).

Furthermore, a little more Googling reveals that the weekly Bil'in protests began in January 2005 (in other words, before Gibreel was born). According to Cambridge University historian Neil Rogachevsky, Bil'in is best described as a suburb of Ramallah, and many of the people in the village actually work for the Palestinian Authority. In an article published in 2010, Rogachevsky goes on to say: "Ramallah pays to keep the Bil'in protest movement alive." No one watching 5 Broken Cameras would ever guess there was any connection.

I visit IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) and watch a documentary short by Guy Davidi called Women Defying Barriers in which four women meet after the invasion of Gaza. The two Jewish women express their personal guilt over the suffering of Palestinian children in Gaza while the two Palestinian women sneer. In Davidi's world, the Palestinian women have no guilt because they have nothing to feel guilty about. Apparently no one has told him that missiles from Gaza rain down on Israeli children too.

I've seen all of this year's Oscar-nominated docs (in addition to The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras, the list includes How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, and Searching for Sugar Man), and I sincerely believe The Gatekeepers is the most serious, timely, and thought-provoking of these five films. But were I forced to bet, I would place my money on 5 Broken Cameras. If that happens, if the doc that takes home this year's Oscar is 5 Broken Cameras, it will be a very sad night for me.

The Gatekeepers opens locally on February 22 at the Landmark Century in Lincoln Park, the Landmark Renaissance in Highland Park, and the CineArts in Evanston. Click here for the complete release schedule. 5 Broken Cameras is already available on DVD from Netflix and can be streamed on Amazon.

  
Melanie Laurent as Annette Monod.

July 16, 1942: Early in the morning, French gendarmes start banging on the doors of thousands of Jewish Parisians, and order them to pack one suitcase of personal effects each plus enough food for two days. They are then loaded onto trucks and herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a sports stadium near the Eiffel Tower known colloquially as the "Vél d'Hiv."

After enduring several days of stifling heat, with poor sanitation and limited fresh water, they are packed off to small regional internment camps outside Paris, and soon after, they are sent on to Auschwitz, where almost all of them are immediately gassed upon arrival.

This black day in history is now known in French as "La Rafle" (in English, "The Vél d'Hiv Round Up"), and if some of this already sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you either read Tatiana de Rosnay's best-selling novel Sarah's Key (published in 2007), or saw the film adaptation released in 2011 (staring Kristin Scott Thomas as an American journalist named "Julia" who is covering French plans to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the Vél d'Hiv Round Up), or both.

Regular readers might recall that I was none too fond of Sarah's Key. In my August 2011 JUF News column, I wrote: "Without giving away the ending, let me just say that while the scenes set in 1942 are urgent and compelling, I couldn't find the adult Sarah in the girl so poignantly played by young Melusine Mayance… These documented historical facts, still so raw and painful, deserve a better framing story."

After I saw the film, I read the novel (that's the rule I follow as a film critic), and I did like the novel more, but only a little. For one thing, the melodramatic scene in which Sarah commits suicide was definitely added by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner and his co-screenwriter Serge Joncour; the fate of the novel's adult Sarah is much more ambiguous. But still, comparing Sarah's ordeal with Julia's domestic travails (which run along parallel lines in both the novel and the film), made me queasy.

So from my POV, it is all to the good that writer/director Rose Bosch keeps La Rafle anchored in the horrific events of 1942, and feels no need to "engage our sympathies" further by adding a contemporary heroine.

The narrative arc of La Rafle follows two characters, both drawn from life. The first is "Joseph Weissman;" the second is "Annette Monoud." Joseph, nicknamed "Jo," is the child of Jews from Poland. Annette Monoud is a French nurse and the daughter of a Protestant minister. We follow them separately for the first third of La Rafle, then their stories forever entwine when they meet in the Vél d'Hiv in the middle of the film.

When we first see him onscreen, Jo (played by Hugo Leverdez) is a happy kid living in a working class neighborhood with his parents and two older sisters. His father "Shmuel" (Gad Elmaleh) is a laborer with left-wing political views. His mother "Sura" (Raphäelle Agogué), who takes in ironing to help the family finances, is more religious. These are hard-working people who treasure their lives in France.

Sura, who sprinkles her clumsy French with Yiddish, has especially bitter memories of life in Lublin. Her consolation is that her children were all born in France, so whatever might happen to her, they are French citizens and therefore they are safe. As the round-up begins, Shmuel even asserts himself with the gendarmes, demanding respect as someone who fought for France in World War I. It doesn't matter. From the perspective of the Vichy Government, they are all just Jews… full stop.

The real Annette Monod came from a prominent French family. Film geeks will love the fact that one of her distant cousins is French director Jean-Luc Godard. Humanitarians will appreciate her close genealogical connection to Jean-Paul Sartre's mother Marie Louise Schweitzer (related on her father's side to Nobel Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer). None of this deep background (Thank you, Google!) is presented in the film, of course, but the Annette we meet onscreen does seem to possess a rare inner fortitude, as well as the firm conviction that she has the right, as a French citizen, to protest the horrendous treatment of her Jewish countrymen at the highest levels.

This appears to have been the real woman (someone who fought for years against the death penalty and ended her days working for Amnesty International); "Annette Monod" isn't just a screenwriter's convenience. (Note that the press kit claims "Today she is one of The Righteous Among The Nations...honored by Israel," but I was not able to verify this on the Yad Vashem website.)

French actress Melanie Laurent (best-known to American audiences for the Jewish characters she has played in Beginners, Inglorious Basterds, and Le Concert) is luminous as the moral center of La Rafle. True, I would have excised her close-ups with young Nono's teddy bear, but that is a really tiny quibble. For the most part, filmmaker Rose Bosch keeps our eyes focused on the abyss without clouding them with tears. Brava!

La Rafle opens tomorrow (January 18) at the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street. For additional dates, times, and tickets, visit their website.

To learn more about La Rafle's historical background, visit the Menemsha Films website.

  

 Inside the Vel d'Hiv. Photos courtesy of Menemsha Films. 

Welcome to New Jersey! When "Andy Brewster" (Seth Rogen) arrives at Newark Airport, his mother "Joyce" (Barbra Streisand) is there to greet him. But although Joyce wears a mile-wide smile, every inch of her tremulous body signals that visits from Andy are few and far between. And thus begins a lovely new film from Anne Fletcher in which two people in one of mankind's most intense dyadic relationships learn to treasure each other anew as separate and unique individuals.

There are good reasons why the "road trip" is such a popular movie genre. As the principals travel from Point A to Point B, filmmakers behind the scenes have a constant supply of raw energy at the ready (new scenery, zany characters, clever plot twists). In the right hands, each stop along the way becomes another jewel in a bracelet audiences can close at the end with a satisfying click of the clasp: "The circle of life."  

In The Guilt Trip, Andy invites Joyce to join him on a cross-country drive so he can pitch to potential distributors like Kmart, Costco, and the Home Shopping Network before returning home to LA. Andy is an organic chemist who has invented a good product (a biodegradable, child-safe and eco-friendly cleaning solution), but he's not much of a salesman. Faced with the prospect of all those strange faces, he suddenly wants his Mommy.

I don't think we ever know exactly where they start from (although there is one scene explicitly set in Montclair), but suffice it to say that while Joyce lives in a comfortable suburban home, she will never meet up with Carmela Soprano in the neighborhood grocery store. Joyce, who has been a widow for decades, lives a quiet life with her friends and her books and her television shows. She spends her time waiting for calls from Andy, who never really needs to call her because she's always calling him. So Joyce is stunned when Andy asks her to come along, but she's immediately on board.

I won't reveal any of the details of their various stops in Tennessee, Texas, Nevada, and California except to say they're tender and endearing, engineered to allow both characters to know more about themselves as well as each other by the time they finally part at the San Francisco airport. Yes, there is a well-earned happy ending prompting both smiles and sniffles.

Rogen is best known for his roles in raunchy Judd Apatow films like Knocked Up and Funny People, but now that he's famous he's also taken roles in small Indies like this year's heart-wrenching Take This Waltz, in which he plays Michelle Williams' Jewish husband "Lou." Is Andy Brewster Jewish? It's hard to imagine Barbra Streisand playing anyone who isn't Jewish, but except for one murmured Yiddish endearment ("tateleh"), the Brewsters, while implicitly Jewish, are never explicitly so. Let's just say it's a given.

Streisand, playing her first lead role in decades, is a joy to watch on screen. (She had funny bits as Ben Stiller's mom "Roz Focker" in Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, but her last starring role was "Rose Morgan" in The Mirror Has Two Faces way back in 1996!) This character, "Joyce Brewster," couldn't be more different from the real Barbra Streisand, and yet she's genuine and totally believable (enough so that her intrusive kvetching is sometimes as irritating to the audience as it is to Andy). Her subtle delivery in the penultimate scene, set high on a hilltop in one of San Francisco's "Painted Ladies," is a lovely little grace note.

Screenwriter Dan Fogelman is definitely Jewish and according to the buzz, he based this story on a real road trip he once took with his own mother (now deceased). If so, this may explain the film's main flaw which is that we don't really know enough about Joyce's backstory. But director Anne Fletcher compensates for this by making Joyce totally vivid in each moment on screen, and so, in the end, I really didn't care much about what she'd really been doing all those years before getting into her car to drive to Newark Airport.

Fletcher began her career as a dancer and made her movie breakthrough as a choreographer in films like Hairspray, but now she's turned to directing, and she's already created two films that have been critical bombs but commercial successes. Like The Guilt Trip, Fletcher's earlier films 27 Dresses and The Proposal are more complex and therefore more rewarding than they appear to be. Dismissed as "RomComs" (Romantic Comedies), both 27 Dresses and The Proposal were really about characters approaching 30 who can't quite grow up until they recognize their parents as people (flaws and all). Clearly The Guilt Trip is a natural addition to this body of work.

I expect The Guilt Trip to get a lot of negative reviews, but don't let that stop you. It's sweet and life-affirming and in this season of hype and bluster, you can do a whole lot worse at your local multiplex.

  
Photo Credit: Sam Emerson/Paramount Pictures Corporation 

In his autobiography The Fry Chronicles, British actor Stephen Fry tells us about the first time he experienced Richard Wagner's four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen. He was a Cambridge University undergraduate, and a friend took him to a Royal Opera House production in London.

"Monday Das Rheingold, Tuesday Die Walküre, Wednesday off, Thursday Siegfried, Friday off and Saturday, Götterdämmerung. A week of Valkyries and Niebelungs and Gods and Heroes and Norns and Giants… It gets into your blood… All Wagnerians know the film that descends over the eyes of those to whom they talk about their obsession, so I will say no more save to point out what is perhaps obvious, that it was a shattering experience and a life-changingly important week for me."

Although you may not recognize the name Stephen Fry, I assure you, you have all seen this veteran British character actor many times in films such as A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Gosford Park (2001), V for Vendetta (2005), and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). In 1997, he starred as Oscar Wilde in the biopic Wilde (with Jude Law and Vanessa Redgrave), and in 2013, he will be in multiplexes everywhere in The Hobbit.

But what you may not know, based on his look as well as his name, is that Fry is Jewish. His maternal grandparents came to England from a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Slovakia, and many of his mother's relatives died in Auschwitz.

So the decision to declare himself Richard Wagner's greatest cinematic advocate almost thirty years after attending that first London production, comes with the self-conscious knowledge that "he" will always be in the background; "he," Adolf Hitler, also a well-known and very passionate Wagnerian.

And now a bit about myself before I go on: Of course I know, just as Fry knows, that many Jewish people with broad cultural taste and deep appreciation for all forms of art, music and literature will not partake of Wagner in any form because of "him." In Israel, Wagner's music is still banned from concert stages although it is sometimes played now on the radio.

A good synopsis of all this was recently provided by The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross, who is currently working on a book called Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. Ross concludes his column  with this ironic quote from Theodore Herzl: "My only recreation [while writing The Jewish State] was listening to Wagner's music in the evening."

My own first expose to Wagner was a college course on the 19^th Century which included his Tristan and Isolde. Like Fry, I was hooked. A few years later, just out of graduate school, I made one of my most expensive purchases to date: two tickets to see Tristan and Isolde at Lyric Opera. I saw my first complete Ring Cycle at the Lyric a few years after that, and my husband and I went again the next time the Lyric offered it. Then, last year, we went to the Met simulcasts at our local multiplex. One Tristan and three Rings, that's over fifty hours of performance time, but compared to Fry, I am a novice!

In Wagner & Me, Fry and director Patrick McGrady travel around Europe visiting sites such as the Villa Wesendonck in Switzerland and the Neuschwanstein Schloss in Bavaria that were critical to Wagner's long gestation process. (The Ring Cycle took approximately 25 years to complete.)

They stage their grand finale in Bayreuth, Germany, where Wagner had an opera house built to his exact specifications for the premiere of The Ring Cycle on August 13, 1876. Wagnerites still flock here every year for the annual Bayreuth Festival (now run under the demanding eyes of two of Wagner's great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner).

Simultaneously, they plot Hitler's rise and fall, with scenes of "him"  waving to adoring crowds  from the balcony of the Festspielhaus Bayreuth in 1938. Fry approaches this inflammatory image with care, adroitly explaining why it does not impact his own love for Wagner's Ring Cycle. McGrady, who also directed the BBC's BAFTA-nominated documentary Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press, knows how to let Fry be Fry, and I sincerely believe Jews everywhere are well-served by the humanistic lessons taught by this ebullient raconteur.

Completed and distributed in Europe in 2010, Wagner and Me was recently acquired by First Run Features and will play at selected art houses all across the United States in 2013. Chicago gets a sneak peek at the Gene Siskel Film Center, with a full week of screenings from Nov 30 through Dec 6. For schedule information, visit: www.SiskelFilmCenter.org.

Stephen Fry plays Wagner's piano in Bayreuth. © Wavelength Films 

PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS

The following week from Dec 14 through Dec 20, the Gene Siskel Film Center will show Avi Nesher's lovely film The Matchmaker, which played in 2010 at our Chicago International Film Festival and in 2011 at our Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema.

As I said in my 2010 review, "Speaking to us from Haifa circa summer 2006 (under active bombardment during the Second Lebanon War), a middle-aged writer named "Arik Burstein" tells us a story about Haifa circa 1968 (exactly one year after the Six-Day War), and therefore the coming-of-age depicted is Israel's as much as his own." 

Read a full review of The Matchmaker on my Blog.

Tuval Shafir as "Arik Burstein" and Adir Miller as "Yankele Bride" in a 1968 scene from The Matchmaker. © Eyal Landesman courtesy of United King Films

 Courtesy of The Film Arcade

Lisa Ohlin's new film Simon and the Oaks is about the choices we sometimes make when we are young, choices that we make without realizing they are choices, choices that turn out to determine the future.

In this case the fateful choice is made by a boy named "Simon" (Jonatan S. Wächter) on his very first day at a new school. Simon is the bookish child of a robust and physically powerfully man named "Erik" (Stefan Gödicke) who worries that others might call his son a wimp. So he forces boxing lessons on a reluctant boy who flees as soon as he can. But once at school, Simon sees students bullying another boy and bam! A boy who could never defend himself finds the inner strength to fight for another.

Grateful "Isak" (Karl Martin Eriksson) immediately becomes Simon's constant companion. These boys come from families that are polar opposities: Simon's family is rural, working class, and Protestant; Isak's family is urban, upper middle class and Jewish. But while cultural differences sometimes create tension, there are no doctrinal religious barriers blocking empathy. Furthermore Erik is a committed Socialist and therefore fervently anti-Nazi, so Simon has no patience with the anti-Semitic chatter of wealthier classmates.

The story opens in the summer of 1939 when what will become World War II is already on the horizon, soon to become a daily nightmare. Isak's father "Ruben" (Jan Josef Liefers) had fled Berlin early, taking sufficent resources to set himself up in Gothenburg, Sweden (where the bulk of the story takes place). Isak and his mother came later, already scared by their traumatic experiences under Nazi boots.

Forget that you know what will happen to most German Jews and what will not happen to most Swedish Jews. One of the strengths of Simon and the Oaks is its ability to capture the terror of the times for all those most impacted. Finally the war is over and a post-war economic boom begins in Sweden. But mutual interdependence during the war years has made these two families so close that their fates are forever intertwined.

Now adults, Simon (Bill Skarsgård) and Isak (Karl Linnertorp) pursue their chosen professions and various girls enter the mix. And always holding everyone together is Simon's mother "Karin" (Helen Sjöholm) a seemingly ordinary woman with a ferocious will. Despite Erik's reservations, Karin makes a place in her home for Isak, and so, although the boys are friends in the film's first hour, in the second hour, they relate to each other more as brothers.

 Simon and the Oaks is a sweeping historical epic filled with rich character detail and deeply inhabited performances. Although the person at the center is clearly Simon (first as a boy and then as a young man), all of the major characters have believable narrative arcs, and none are short-changed. Screenwriter Marnie Blok has distilled the essence of Marianne Fredriksson's beloved source novel (very long and very dense) without turning anyone from three dimensions into two.

Many talented women also play small but significant supporting roles, including Isak's mother, Simon's aunt, and Ruben's neice (an Auschwitz survivor). Each actress makes a contribtion that resonates.

With a budget of $7.5 million, Simon and the Oaks is one of the most expensive feature films ever produced in Sweden, and almost none of it has been wasted on explosions, chases or other tedious "special" effects.  The cinematography is luminous with natural light and furtive shadows; the art direction, set direction, and costume design are precise and attentive; and the soundtrack is filled with luscious musical snippets (often from The Symphony Fantastique by Hector Berlioz) which actually play a critical role in the plot.

 Simon and the Oaks received 13 nominations recently for Guldbagge Awards from the Swedish Film Institute (aka the "Swedish Oscars") including Best Picture and Best Director, and I'm sure it deserved every one of them. It is the kind of "old fashioned" film rarely seen in American multiplexes these days, the kind of film I have always loved and always welcome. Brava, Lisa Ohlin!

 Simon and the Oaks  opens in Metro Chicago  at the Landmark Century Center in Lincoln Park and the Landmark Renaissance Place in Highland Park on Oct 19.

 Tzivi's Sneak Peek: The Loneliest Planet

Last night I saw a screening of Julia Loktev's new film The Loneliest Planet at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. (Turns out I can just hop on the Q Train in Brooklyn and I'm there in under an hour!)

I wrote a rave review of  Loktev's first film  Day Night Day Night   in my JUF News report on the 42^nd annual Chicago International Film Festival way back in 2006, and The Loneliest Planet is even better.

Although there is no obvious Jewish content, The Loneliest Planet stars Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg (best-known for her excellent supporting roles in Campfire and Yossi and Jagger), and it's wonderful to see Furstenberg spread her wings in the center of this searing narrative.

Does the character of "Nica" have to be Jewish? Probably not. But as created by Loktev and embodied by Furstenberg, I am completely convinced that she is. Bravi, Banot!

 The Loneliest Planet opens in New York and LA on Oct 26, and at the Music Box Theatre in Andersonville on Nov 2.