Lucky To Be Alive

I stumbled into the men’s room after attending a screening of Fugitive Pieces, and as I washed my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror and was horrified at what I saw. Who was this old man staring back at me? When I bounded into the multiplex and bought my ticket, I felt young, spry, full of promise, and in love with cinema. But now, sadly, Fugitive Pieces had left me old, weary, barely able to stagger outside the theatre under my own locomotion, every last spark of life that once coursed through my bloodstream snuffed out by the crushing dullness, the suffocating tastefulness of Fugitive Pieces. So numbing was this film’s effect that I barely realized what this movie was doing to me there in the theatre—my skin turning dry and brittle, my hair turning grey, the muscles in my limbs atrophying. Thank God this movie didn’t last 20 minutes longer, or else I might have died right there in my seat, one more anonymous, unmourned victim of the English-language Canadian film industry. The scourge of the nation!

Fugitive Pieces is based on the novel by Anne Michaels, a book which I (like most people I know) read about 20 pages of before giving up on it. (Sorry... I can only handle so much "beautiful writing" before I bail out.) It’s the story of Jakob Beer, who as a young Polish boy watches Nazis massacre his entire family (including his beloved older sister Bella). After fleeing into the forest, he is rescued by Athos (Rade Serbedzija), a kindly Greek archaeologist who smuggles the boy back home with him to the idyllic island of Eidos, raising him on a diet of lamb, fish, and old Greek folk sayings.

After the war ends, Athos accepts a teaching job at the University of Toronto, where Jakob (now played by Stephen Dillane) grows up into a successful writer of insufferably pretentious-sounding books and the lover of Alex, a beautiful, high-spirited blonde shiksa (Rosamund Pike). But the loss of Bella continues to weigh heavily on Jakob’s mind—and only after many years, many, many return trips to Greece, and many, many, many scenes of Jakob staring expressionlessly at old photographs is he able to find true happiness with a new lover, Michaela (Ayelet Zurer), who finds Jakob’s morose personality, nondescript looks, and tendency to follow up sex with long, melancholy monologues about how his sister was raped and killed by Nazi soldiers inexplicably alluring.

Fugitive Pieces was written and directed by Toronto-born filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, who has worked on a long list of high-profile TV dramas, including Six Feet Under, Rome, The Riches, Dexter, Nip/Tuck, and many, many more. Podeswa is by all accounts an efficient, professional director: he gets along with actors, he can adhere to a tight schedule, and he can deliver good-looking footage without any distracting auteurist indulgences getting in the way. But whenever Podeswa turns his hand to features, it’s his shortcomings that are more apparent: a problem with pace, dull visual metaphors, and a very Canadian kind of emotional reticence. Podeswa’s previous films, The Five Senses and Eclipse, are everything I hate about Canadian movies—the kind of superficially “intelligent,” “arty” indie fare that doesn’t actually do anything to startle your brain or your eye.

And in Stephen Dillane, Podeswa has found his perfect leading man—as Jakob, Dillane gives a performance so locked-in, so bloodless, so starved of vitality, it’s almost like some kind of acting stunt, as if he and Podeswa decided to see if it was possible for someone to go through an entire movie without doing anything even the slightest bit interesting.

How in the world did Podeswa extract this performance from Dillane? Did he demand multiple takes from him, to the point of exhaustion, like David Fincher on the set of Zodiac? Did he hypnotize him before the cameras started rolling, like Werner Herzog did to the cast of Heart of Glass? Or did he just show him the dailies of Fugitive Pieces and crush his spirit that way, setting up an infinite feedback loop of dullness?