fine whine

Focus sucked. For a movie with such serious subject matter it sure took everything lightly, or at least displayed an utter lack of seriousness. The characters were mostly cut out of paper thinner than the DVD chapter insert. William H. Macy tried hard to portray a conflicted guy who faces apparent persecution in WWII New York after buying glasses that "look Jewish", but that alone does not a good movie make. Laura Dern gets thrown in, also cast to look Jewish but not be, but she doesn't elevate the film any more than Meat Loaf (also starring) does.

He plays the alpha bigot, determined to cleanse the neighborhood. He's also a former friend of Macy's character, but the two have come into some tension lately, particularly after the glasses purchase. Loaf (actually, Aday) plays him without subtlety or nuance, seemingly channeling all the stereotypical mob villains by way of The Sopranos's Silvio (Steve Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen's E-street band).

The real star of the show, tied perhaps with Macy's performance, is the striking and vivid colors permeating every inch of almost every frame. It could be a touch of irony, to have such a beautiful design for such an ugly idea. Or it could be a former photographer's sense of something or other seeping through in directing. The film as a whole does not gel right, lapsing often into exaggerated camera angles and distorted dream sequences.

For some reason that strikes me as something of an artsy-fartsy touch. What this movie needed was a human touch, one to give everybody some depth and humanity. Everybody but Dern, Macy and David Paymer (who plays Finkelstein, the real Jew on the street) are either irrelevant or outright evil. I don't like being told how I am supposed to feel and act, particularly when such instructions are beat into my head with a sledgehammer.

Adding to the whole wrongness of the movie is the poor production design. I know I praised the colors and whatnot, but they seem out of place. Not so out of place as some of the costumes, though; Macy is a snappy dresser but his pants are far too baggy for wartime.

Speaking of clothes, there's a sequence that I can only assume came from the little-known Arthur Miller source novel. In it we see Macy getting a delivery worth $450 from a department store. We see him next upstairs with his newly wedded wife trying on a number of extravagant outfits. Though he is quite taken with her beauty and fashion sense, we soon see him handing back the boxes to the delivery man, and not long after telling his wife that they shouldn't be buying and returning such expensive clothes and son on and so forth. In a tenth grade literature class, such a scene in a book or play might be symbolic of something but I've been out of tenth grade too long (and I suspect the filmmakers have as well) to care. Skip this movie.