‘Fugitive Pieces’: Film’s storytelling skillful, but pulls novel’s last punch
Published 4:32 pm Thursday, June 26, 2008
Based on a novel by Anne Michaels, “Fugitive Pieces” has a literary texture that emerges in pleasing ways. Not just because it’s about a writer, but because it has a measured, bookish approach to existence.
The writer at the center of the film is Jakob (played as an adult by Stephen Dillane of “The Hours”), a haunted poet. As a child in Warsaw during World War II, he saw his parents and his beloved sister dragged away to extermination camps.
Jakob survived with the aid of a Greek archaeologist (Rade Sherbedgia), who kept him hidden and safe in a small town in Greece. They moved to Canada together after the war, where Jakob grew up into a talented but tortured writer.
Director-adapter Jeremy Podeswa has arranged the movie in such a way that it unfolds in nonchronological order — so it takes a while to sort out Jakob’s youthful experiences, let alone what he’s up to as an adult.
His marriage passes by as a series of frustrations for his wife (Rosamund Pike, from “Pride &Prejudice”), who can’t abide Jakob’s solitary nature. And he keeps returning to Greece, as though to paw the ground in search of answers.
The subject matter sounds somber, and it is. Podeswa certainly lightens the burden by bringing a designer’s eye to the world he creates here. The Greek settings are beautiful, and the apartment Jakob grows up in is a classic. His wife wonders why he can’t move out of the same place he’s lived for decades, but maybe it’s not that he’s clinging to the past — maybe he just knows how hard it is to find an apartment this stupendous.
Dillane, who’s a fine actor yet somehow indistinguishable from a half-dozen other British actors his age, must remain in low gear throughout his performance, and he is utterly convincing as a man who lives with ghosts.
Entering the film at a late point is Ayelet Zurer, an Israeli actress seen in “Munich.” She’s fine, but this character suggests a forced resolution to the story that feels tidy compared to what’s come before.
More damagingly (and here is a spoiler alert, or an “absent spoiler”), the film has been shorn of its original downbeat ending, which apparently bummed out audiences at its first film festival showings last autumn. This makes for a soft resolution, not the right note for such a traumatized story.
