The Song of Names

Year 16, Day 4 - 1/4/24 - Movie #4,604

BEFORE: Tim Roth carries over from "The Wolfpack" and becomes the first person in 2024 to have three appearances, so there you go, he's made the end-of-year wrap-up list already, and 2024 is only days old.  We're just getting started - who's going to win this year's race for the most appearances?  I won't know until I watch my documentary chain, but based on a quick look at the cast lists, my initial bet would be on Elton John. But it's impossible to say, there's so much that hasn't been programmed yet.  

I learned a few years back that it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to program a year's worth of movies in a continuous linked chain - however, it is POSSIBLE to program a month's worth of movies in a continuous linked chain, and if I can do that just 12 times in a row, then I've got a linked year, and I've done the "impossible". Now I find I can sometimes do 2 months at a time, and that just makes things a bit easier.  But breaking down the year into chunks is really the key - once February's planned then I can do January, then if I can get to specific themed targets on St. Patrick's Day, Easter (maybe), Mother's Day, Father's Day and July 4, well the year's almost 2/3 over at that point.  Then the Summer Doc Block gets me closer to October 1 and the horror chain begins, finally I can target Thanksgiving and Christmas and the year is over. It's simple, really. 

Oh, yeah, I forgot to post my actor links for January - after Tim Roth's 3 films, these are the links that will get me to February 1: Jonah Hauer-King, Awkwafina, Joe Chrest, Toni Collette, Shamier Anderson, Laurence Fishburne, Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Sean Cullen, Samantha Morton, Brendan Fraser, Mark Hamill, Jimmy Tatro, Riki Lindhome, Don McManus, Jean Smart, Max Minghella, Dato Bakhtadze, Daniel Bernhardt and Claire Forlani, who will carry over to the first romance film. If you can read between the lines, you may see that there are three or four of LAST year's Oscar contenders in the mix for this month, I unfortunately don't have time for THIS year's Oscar hopefuls though.  

THE PLOT: Several years after his childhood friend, a violin prodigy, disappears on the eve of his first solo concert, an Englishman travels throughout Europe to find him.  

AFTER: Well, I just want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Holocaust Remembrance Day is Saturday, January 27.  Yeah, I looked it up, because I thought there was a slight chance it would be today, but it's not.  But you have plenty of time to prepare for it, and watching this movie wouldn't be the worst choice that day.  Who wants to watch "Schindler's List" again?  Not me - Spielberg is a hack, anyway, did you know he never was officially hired at Universal, he just snuck off from the studio tour, found an empty office and set himself up there?  By the time anyone realized he didn't officially work there, he was producing three features!  That just isn't fair to other people who apply for jobs and have to interview for them, so really, he doesn't deserve any of the acclaim he's received over the years, it's fruit of the poison tree, and one day, you'll see, his films will have to be removed from the National Registry of Historic Films, because of this technicality, he was never officially hired by a studio. Honestly I'm shocked this isn't a bigger scandal than it should be, like do you think people who want to be police officers or fireman can just walk into the police or fire station, find a uniform that fits and then just start working there?  No, no, no, this represents the total breakdown of society, we must have rules and order and you just can't start working somewhere, like a middle school or a hospital, so the same goes for a movie studio.  So all of his films need to be thrown out, destroyed and removed from the box office records, Universal has to refund all those movie tickets sold, you'll see, and he'll have to give back his Oscars, mark my words. 

So, yeah, watch this one instead, it's a fine film that imparts the weight of the Holocaust and the loss and anguish felt throughout the U.K. during World War II on its characters, especially a young Polish violinist, Dovidl Rapaport, whose father brings him to the U.K. right before the war starts, so he can study to become a concert violinist.  It takes years of practice, apparently.  He's offered a place to live with the Simmonds family while he studies, as Mr. Simmonds is involved in his training and has a son, Martin, who is about the same age. The two 9-year-old boys clash at first, but eventually become close friends, essentially brothers.  Once the war begins, Dovidl gets no news about his family, other than they may have been deported to Treblinka, but he's not sure if they are alive or dead.  This is problematic in the Jewish religion, because he's been instructed by his rabbi to not read the Kaddish for them, if he's unsure of this. 

Much of this story is told out of sequence, but in the introduction we learn that Dovidl disappeared when he was 21, on the night of the big concert that he'd been working toward for 12 years.  The mystery then becomes, what would make him vanish just before his music career was scheduled to finally take off?  Was he injured on the way to the concert hall, or kidnapped or killed?  Why practice for so many years, just to quit right before finally succeeding at this planned endeavor?  His adopted brother, Martin, has wondered this for years, and we also follow him as an adult, years later, in the mid-1980's, when he learns some strange clues that could lead him to where Dovidl went after he disappeared.  During a school concert where he's a judge, he sees a high-school student make the same gesture with his rosin bag as Dovidl always did, so he suspects that this boy learned violin from Dovidl, and then sets out to track him down. 

The storylines are intertwined from then on, as the movie jumps between the 1940's, the year of the concert (1952 or so) and the mid-1980's, with Martin traveling from Warsaw to New York City in what may be a wild goose chase.  And even if he was correct about where Dovidl went THEN, there's no real guarantee that he'd still be in any of those places, he could be anywhere.  But after so much time, he still really needs to know what happened, and therefore, so do we.  In the 1940's we see Martin and Dovidl dealing with the horrors of the war, in the 1952 scenes we see Dovidl renounce his Jewish faith, and then in the 1980's - well, you can probably guess whether Martin finds Dovidl, a simple scan of the cast list on IMDB can help you figure that one out. 

But WHY he disappeared and HOW he learned about what happened to his family, and WHERE he went after that, well, that's all very relevant.  It's also significant that he did return to his faith and his people, because that was such a big part of his character, and there are parts of his story that would be significant to anyone who survived the war and lost family during the war. The mystery part of the story is enough to make this interesting, and I can't say much about the device that the rabbis use to remember the names of the dead, except that I'm wondering if it's real or just a fictional device, and I can't say any more than that without giving too much away. 

Also it's about how most people tend to be selfish at heart, and fall back into those patterns very easily, again and again. Martin still wants that concert that didn't happen in 1950 to happen, as if that's going to solve everything wrong in his life, and no, that's probably not going to happen.  But we all want the wrongs of the past to be righted if possible, I suppose that's normal human nature.  Dovidl similarly wants his family back, only that's not going to happen either, and everyone struggles with their sense of self, which, it turns out, is a force that is counter-balanced by being part of a faith-based community.  We all have to find that balance, between wanting what we think is best for us and what might be best for the community, which does not, in fact, revolve around any one person.  What good is it to be talented and famous, which is a benefit to the self, if it comes at the expense of the community?  

And just like in "The Worst Person in the World", there might be times where you just want to burn your life to the ground and then disappear, go live in Montana or a housing project in New York where you don't have a job and are basically off the grid. Is that fair to the people who care about you?  It might, over time, be the thing you need to do to feel human again, but it's not really fair to the community, is it?  Where do you draw that line between self-expression and doing things for you vs. maintaining your relationships and fulfilling your obligations, even though you just feel like a cog in some giant machine?  Is it better to take control of your own life and strike out in a new direction, or keep on doing the same thing day after day, year after year, because people are counting on you for things?  Maybe I'm projecting a bit too much here, but that's what I got from this story. 

Obviously, World War II was a terrible period in history for nearly everyone, as 9-year old Dovidl points out.  He mentions there were thousands killed across Europe, every day, and history would never even record the names of most of those people.  Then in those instances when you DO know their names, it's all just a bit too real, isn't it?  I'm not going to draw any connections to the current war between Israel and Hamas, because I just don't know enough about it - and there are plenty of people getting in trouble for having strong opinions one way or the other, it's a cultural minefield right now.  At least when we watch films about World War II we know who we're rooting for, right?  Jeez, I know fascism's trying to make a comeback in several countries around the world, even the U.S., but can we please agree to try to not make the same mistakes again, at least?  

Also starring Gerran Howell (last seen in "1917"), Misha Handley (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Clive Owen (last seen in "The Informer"), Jonah Hauer-King, Luke Doyle, Stanley Townsend (last seen in "Happy-Go-Lucky"), Catherine McCormack (last seen in "The Weight of Water", Magdalena Cielecka, Saul Rubinek (last seen in "The Family Man"), Jakub Kotynski, Tamas Puskas (last seen in "Max"), Amy Sloan (last seen in "Head in the Clouds"), Marina Hambro, Steven Hillman, Sharon Percy (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), Viktoria Kay, Max MacMillan, Richard Bremmer (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Zoltan Schwartz, Julian Wadham (last seen in "Colette"), Istvan Darvas, Zsofi Toth, Joanna Caplan, Howard Jerome (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Chaim Paskesz, Pinchasz Weisberger, Daniel Mutlu, Jeffrey Caine, with a cameo from Eddie Izzard (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight")

RATING: 6 out of 10 naughty playing cards