In the opening scenes of
Jeremy Podeswa's adaptation of Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces, a young boy hides in his
house in Poland in 1942, and through the cracks in the baseboard, he watches
Nazis kill his parents and abduct his sister. Throughout the film, Podeswa cuts
back and forth between the story of how that little boy survived the war and
how as an adult (played by Stephen Dillane) he tries to make a new life for
himself in Canada as an author and professor. Yet even as Dillane is living in
a well-appointed home with lovely young social butterfly Rosamund Pike, he
still takes a worm's-eye view of life, always peering through the cracks.
By and large, Fugitive
Pieces is
a familiar Holocaust survivor's tale, in that it's about a group of
people—Dillane and the remaining people he knows from back home—who
are so scarred by their memory of want and loss that they resent those who take
simple things like apples for granted. What distinguishes this particular story
is the specific neuroses of Dillane's character: a man who didn't have it
nearly as rough as some of his fellow Polish Jews, and so can sympathize both
with those who made it through the camps, and with the seemingly ungrateful
generation conceived after the war. Dillane deals with his multiple
sensitivities by diving into his writing, and purging his angst on the page in
acclaimed books. It takes a succession of helpful women—mother-figures
and girlfriends, mainly—to get him to stop internalizing the negativity
of the world and start generating something positive of his own.
Fugitive Pieces is a lush-looking film,
and the changes Dillane goes through are touching and even uplifting—but
those payoffs come late, and only after a lot of quiet, torturous
soul-searching that doesn't convey well onscreen. There's very little dynamic
to the film. During the war, Dillane's character is hungry, but he's still
living in a lovingly lit home on a gorgeous Greek island; after he travels to
Canada, he mostly moves from one warm room to another, sharing company with
intellectuals and idealists. Podeswa doesn't introduce enough contrast between
want and abundance, and while he has a handle on what camera angles best express
his protagonists' point of view, he rarely varies the scenery. In many ways, Fugitive
Pieces is
a beautiful film. But it's a bit too beautiful.