This adaptation of Anne Michael's award-winning, best-selling lyrical novel bears comparison to the movie version of Michael Ondaatje's book The English Patient.
In that case, writer-director Anthony Minghella extracted from Ondaatje's challenging, some might say impenetrable, text various slivers of character, back story and plot that he was able to flesh out into a screenplay vastly different from what most readers had anticipated.
In a similar fashion, writer-director Jeremy Podeswa has opted to tell his Fugitive Pieces from only one of the narrative points of view found in Michael's original story, effectively downgrading a major character and jettisoning a third of the novel. As always happens in a situation like this, CanLit purists will be outraged, even though the movie they are served is an impressive exercise in editing and compression. Some may defend the result by saying that the entire arc of Michael's novel is probably unfilmable, and that this is as good as it was ever going to get.
This then is the sad story of Jakob Beer, whom we first see as a child (Robbie Kay) in rural Poland, hiding as the Nazis conduct a pogrom, murdering his parents and hauling away his 15-year-old sister, Bella (Nina Dobrev). After being rescued by an archaeologist named Athos Roussos (Rade Serbedzija) and living out the Occupation on a Greek island, Jakob washes up in Toronto. As an adult (Stephen Dillane), he writes poetry and history and dwells endlessly upon his past, haunted by his last glimpse of Bella.
Podeswa's script is a web of flashbacks and flash-forwards, as portentous things occur to Jakob and as various important people enter and leave his life. (If you insist on linear storytelling, skip this one.) By necessity, the movie relies on narration to impart Jakob's thoughts and writings, and after a while it seems as if he can only speak in aphorism and mournful rumination. Playing what is essentially the victim of circumstances, Dillane delivers a largely passive performance, letting Jakob's words speak louder than his actions.
Hard on the heels of Emotional Arithmetic, this is the second Canadian movie in less than a month to deal with notions of grief, loss and the power of memory, set against the events of the Holocaust. This one comes with added potential for controversy, since it now offers a radically different ending from the version that premiered last fall at the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals. The virtue of this new ending is that it won't send moviegoers out of the theatre in a profoundly depressed funk, with the exception of the novel's most devoted fans, who will likely feel betrayed.
