Jakob The Liar

Comedy, Drama, War

Robin Williams	Jakob Heym/Narrator
Hannah Taylor-Gordon	Lina Kronstein
Eva Igo	Lina's Mother
István Bálint	Lina's Father
Justus von Dohnanyi	Preuss
Kathleen Gati	Hooker
Bob Balaban	Kowalsky
Alan Arkin	Max Frankfurter
Michael Jeter	Avron
Mark Margolis	Fajngold
Éva Igó

Director	Peter Kassovitz
Producer	Steven Haft; Marsha Garces Williams
Writer	Jurek Becker; Peter Kassovitz

Jakob the Liar has a hard road to travel, since--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful aside--milking the Holocaust for laughs is a dangerous game. Even the blackest, most therapeutic humour turns queasy in the shadow of such monstrous evil: it's like dancing on a mass grave. Here the eponymous schlemiel plays out his semi-farcical adventures in the mean streets of the Warsaw Ghetto circa 1944. The skies are always leaden over Jakob's hometown, reflecting the comic climate that pervades this mostly unfortunate adaptation of Jurek Becker's autobiographical book (first filmed in 1975). Jakob Heym (Robin Williams in overbearingly earnest mode) gets tangled in a string of self-perpetuating lies about a hidden radio, supposedly broadcasting news that the victorious Red Army is nearing. His desperate attempts to convince a clutch of insistently idiosyncratic friends (clichés to a man: Liev Schreiber, Bob Balaban, Michael Jeter, Alan Arkin) and obligatory Nazi bad guys that the radio doesn't exist are complicated by the fact that he's stashed a fugitive kid (a dead ringer for Anne Frank) in his attic--and by abundant evidence that lies are the best medicine for the ghetto's skyrocketing suicide rate. Copious unfunny misunderstandings and pratfalls abound in this Holocaust rendition of Fiddler on the Roof (you expect Williams to break into "If I were a funny man... "). Ultimately, Jakob the Liar loses its way for good in some very ugly violence and a rather nasty final twist: the film's ending might just be rubbing our noses in another feel-good lie. --Kathleen Murphy, Amazon.com