Gregory E Kitchens
Screenwriter/director Natalie Portman's A Tale of Love and Darkness is a brilliantly conceived, masterfully crafted, emotionally powerful, exceptionally thought-provoking work of art. Though Portman's screenplay is based on the memoir by Amos Oz, the resulting film is not just a simple, chronological narrative about the author's life. Instead, Portman has crafted a uniquely cinematic depiction of Oz's attempt to understand his mother's (and to a lesser extent, his father's) psychological state of mind leading up to a crucial event in their lives, in order to explain how it affected his later life. A lessor artist would have been content to simply tell us what happened, but Portman's focus is on helping us understand Oz's beliefs about why it happened, with every scene in the film being a clue to help illuminate his reasoning. To render this complex story of self-analysis in cinematic terms, Portman presents the story from Amos Oz's point of view, using a narrator (portraying Oz at age 63) to guide us through all of the memories he uses as clues to try to understand his parent's actions. But instead of having the narrator explain the relevance of each memory as the film proceeds, Portman challenges us to collect all of the pieces of a complex psychological puzzle so that when the narrator finally explains his conclusion, we are able to duplicate Oz's intellectual process and put the pieces together ourselves, allowing us to understand why Oz chooses to believe what he chooses to believe. Oz's analysis is presented as an intriguing blend of second-hand knowledge of his parents' early life, facts he knows about his parents from first-hand experience (often from spying on them), life-lessons his mother taught him, lessons he learned from real-life experiences, metaphors he discovered in the stories that he and his mother created together for fun, and symbolism he found in the etymology of Hebrew words taught to him by his father. Portman's script manages to weave together all of these different types of clues into an impressionistic pattern that gives the narrator's conclusion a ring of truth once it is revealed. Even so, Portman gives us a lot to think about. For one thing, some of the clues are complicated, requiring the audience to piece together information learned in different scenes. For example, Amos and his mother, Fania, are each bullied by different people in separate scenes, and Portman leaves it up to the audience to compare the ways that Fania and Amos handle the bullying, and to figure out how this helps Amos understand his mother's psychology. As another example, there is a heartbreaking scene that shows what happened during a chance meeting between a young, idealistic Amos and a Palestinian girl prior to the outbreak of war. That scene, combined with the scenes comparing the Jewish people's expectations about the future of Israel to the reality that emerges during and after the war, teaches Oz about a particular aspect of human nature that proves to be a crucial element of his reasoning. Portman also adds depth to this film by including a scene where Fania tells Amos that nobody can truly understand another human being and it is better to accept not knowing than to believe erroneously. This scene adds yet another layer of melancholy to an already gloomy story by implying that no matter how much thought Oz has given this matter nor how well reasoned his conclusion, he knows it is impossible for him (or us) to know whether his conclusion is truly correct. A brilliantly complex, multi-layered script such as this requires a strong director to bring it to life successfully, and in this capacity, Portman proves herself to be a true virtuoso. She and editors Andrew Mondshein and Hervé Schneid create scenes that linger, giving her audiences time to reflect and absorb the content and the beauty of the images. Portman also makes scenes of violence more effective by avoiding the gore and focusing on the human cost. In just a few brief scenes, she manages to convey the truly terrible cost of the birth of Israel, with one of the most gut-wrenching moments in the film occurring with the actor off-camera, and another occurring while we listen to Fania grieving over the loss of a friend. Of course, Portman manages to get excellent performances from all of the actors (including herself), but she also knows how to manage the visual content of a film to enhance her ability to communicate with the audience. She has an eye for composition that makes even scenes of squalor look eerily beautiful, and she knows how to communicate what is most important in each scene. She and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak use a dazzling array of visual techniques to convey the meaning of the story, such as adjusting the color saturation to make the storytelling sequences more vibrant than reality. They also create an intriguing blend of realistic, surrealistic, and symbolic images. For example, during one of the storytelling sequences, they present a stunning image of black birds filling up a white sky to create an image similar to an M.C. Escher lithograph. Another memorable example was a lingering visual of Fania's out-of-focus head that turns and suddenly comes into focus. The script, the acting, and the visual presentation are deftly managed by Portman to create a completely draining emotional experience for the audience. To cap it off, the music by Nicholas Britell is hauntingly effective at conveying the mood of the story. This film is an unusual work of art that should be viewed with an open mind and judged for what it is, not for what you think it should be. If you are excited by the prospect of seeing a well-made, challenging, artistic film that is densely populated with metaphors and symbolism – a complex film that challenges you to try to understand another person's understanding of yet another person's psychology – then this film is an absolute "must see."
David Ferguson
Greetings again from the darkness. The establishment of the state of Israel and the memoir of Amos Oz are the foundation of the feature film directorial debut of Natalie Portman. First time directors don't typically fight over such source material, but it has always seemed that Ms. Portman was headed towards bigger (and more important) things.She was born in Jerusalem and this story opens in that city during 1945. The narrator is the elderly Amos and the story is told through the eyes of young Amos (a very effective Amir Tessler) … though the focus is on his mother Fania (played by Ms. Portman).The tensions between Jews and Arabs are ever-present, but this is the mostly personal and intimate struggle of Fania and her family. She has survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, though many of her family and friends did not. In fact, her inability to overcome this past and adjust to the new world is what has the biggest impact on young Amos and his scholarly father Arieh (Gilad Kahana). Amos soon figures out that the litmus test for his mother's mood is whether she is telling stories of the old days, or staring blankly into a void.Watching someone fade away and experience death by depression/disappointment/unfulfilled dreams goes so against what we typically see on screen – the emotionally strong and heroic types. Portman's performance makes it believable, but no less difficult to watch … for us or young Amos.The film is well shot and well acted, and much more is conveyed through faces and movement than spoken words … somewhat unusual for the recollections of a writer. The color palette and the silence dominate many scenes, and it seems appropriate given the situation of this family. Expect to see many more projects from director Portman, as she obviously has much to say.
Nozz
The movie is beautiful and sometimes quite self-conscious about it, settling into a sequence of many set pieces each of which seems to make a point of its own until remembering them all (to see how they're relevant later on) becomes quite a chore, at least for a bear of little brain like me. There is not much dramatic impetus driving the film along, except that at one point the War of Independence carries the action with its start, middle, and end. What keeps the audience in its seat is more the poetry of the visuals and the thoughtfulness of the text than any great tension or suspense from moment to moment.A juvenile actor in a major role is always a challenge. In this case, the kid certainly doesn't spoil the movie, but he doesn't make the scenes his own either. His looks don't proclaim him to be the naive and sensitive outsider he's supposed to be; in fact his looks aren't distinctive at all, and a single child actor is used for too many years of plot. (At the start he's behaving too much younger than he looks.)The narrator explains in retrospect that the Arabs and Jews of Palestine would have got along fine if only they had understood they were all fellow victims of Europe. The proposition is questionable in the light of the current war of civilizations, but coming from writer Amos Oz it is a mercifully mild example of his kooky politics and we're lucky the film contains nothing worse. Natalie Portman was allowed to make Oz' book into a melancholy elegy that resembles a walk through a beautiful but exhaustingly large museum. Item after item. "It was nice," I said to my wife afterward. "It was, but toward the end I was just waiting for it to finish," she replied.
