Release Date: September 24, 1999
Starring: Robin Williams, Liev Schreiber, Hannah Taylor-Gordon, Alan Arkin, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Bob Balaban
Directed by: Peter Kassovitz
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, disturbing images)
When the press and critics became aware that Robin Williams was starring in a new film involving the Holocaust, two films resurfaced in remarks and comments. The first, inevitably, was Schindler's List, marked by some as the most powerful film of this decade and certainly one of the most realistic accounts of Nazi concentration camps this side of Normandy. The second was 1998's surprise hit, the award-winning Italian dramedy Life Is Beautiful, which featured Robert Benigni's nauseating antics as an antidote to the depressing confines of the ghetto. In retrospect, however, veteran French director Peter Kassovitz's Jakob the Liar is neither of those two; instead, it is an aborted vehicle for Williams' shot-in-the-dark dramatic career that does not lend a positive light to his talents.
The film is one of those painfully un-comic ventures that has a solid stock of jokes which do not inspire laughter. The opening lines are a familiar pun: "Hitler goes to a fortune teller and asks when he'll die. The fortune teller says, 'On a Jewish holiday.' Hitler wants to know how she can be so sure, and she responds, 'Any day you die will become a Jewish holiday.' " The rest of the movie's 115-minute running time has Robin Williams scampering around the ghetto tossing flippant remarks to fellow Jews. This might have been a hilarious movie at some point, but the nature of the film makes the audience want to take Williams and director Kassovitz seriously, spoiling the comedy.
Williams stars as the title character of Jakob Heym, a café owner who is forced to live in the ghettos of Nazi Germany. On the streets after curfew one night, he's sent to the commandant's office to explain himself, but on the way he overhears a radio news bulletin announcing Russian advances into Poland. Returning to the ghetto, he repeats this information to his campmates, and they begin to think that the radio belongs to Jakob. Urgently pressing him for more news on the state of the war, Jakob realizes he can inspire hope and good spirits by concocting false news reports. Soon, however, the Nazis learn of these uplifting reports and begin to search the ghetto for the usurper.
Director Kassovitz handles this plot entirely wrong -- he spends too much time on the nervous Jakob trying to escape the reputation of having a radio and too little time on Jakob's quest for hope and goodwill. There is a scene, late in the movie, in which Jakob entertains a young girl by pretending to have the radio. It's really the only time Williams shines in his role, for it allows him to escape the confines of his character and simply do standup comedy. By the end, viewers will find themselves wishing that the Kassovitz and Didier Decoin screenplay (based on the novel by Jurek Becker) had given Williams more opportunities to do his shtick.
For all that they try, however, neither star Williams nor director Kassovitz can get Jakob to escape the nadir of Holocaust filmmaking. The costumes and the set decoration are almost cliched enough to become a bad parody of any concentration camp or Jewish ghetto you've ever seen, and their presence gives a halfhearted tone to the movie. It's as if the producers wanted to make sure that audiences would not take their film seriously, and at whatever the cost.
This is a bad position for Robin Williams to be in. Although audiences may have been willing to forgive him his missteps in the chronically esoteric What Dreams May Come, they may not ignore him a second time. Certainly, if not for the popular charm of Patch Adams, Williams would be in a significant slump that would take a masterpiece of a production to get out of. Jakob the Liar is not the one.
all contents © 1999 Craig Roush