Jakob the Liar (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/ Member: Online Film Critics Society
"I DON'T HAVE A RADIO!" Starring Robin Williams, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Alan Arkin, Liev Schreiber. Rated PG-13.
Robin Williams has the rarest of gifts: the ability to rise above the most inept material and suffuse it with his irreverent style. Overwhelmingly, his worst films are pleasantly diverting at worst and enjoyable at best (with the notable exception of Flubber). So when I, the one person who has refused to abandon him despite Patch Adams, tell you that not even Williams can save his latest project, you know it's in trouble. Jakob the Liar is a confused, muddled little movie; a generically "uplifting" film with a fundamental contradiction: the message it delivers is depressing as opposed to inspiring and the movie doesn't realize it.
Williams plays Jakob Haim, a Jew imprisoned in a Polish ghetto during World War II. One night he wanders outside after curfew and is promptly sent to the office of a high-ranking German officer for his punishment. Jakob gets off easy and he gets to hear approximately 30 seconds of a radio broadcast. The announcement (in English, but punctuated by a triumphant "Heil Hitler!") is that Russian troops are only miles away from Jakob's ghetto. Liberation! he thinks. The next day, Jakob tells the news to his closest friend, a volatile prize fighter named Misha (Liev Schreiber), who despite being sworn to secrecy passes the message along.
Soon, it is a common assumption in the ghetto that Jakob has a radio hidden in his home -- a crime punishable by death. This is absurdly false, but the more Jakob tells the people of the ghetto this, the more convinced they become that he is abreast of the latest developments in the war that is to decide their fate. The danger, of course, is that the Germans allegedly have informants throughout the ghetto, and rumors about the radio can get out and put Jakob in great danger.
In a curiously irrelevant subplot, Jakob finds a 11-year old girl who has separated from her parents and decides to hide her in his small home. Apparently he is afraid that she will be discovered, and goes to great length to make sure of that -- just why the idea frightens him is never made clear. He and the girl build an uninvolving, generic relationship that never goes anywhere and is as irrelevant at the end as it was in the beginning.
The moral of the story is that hope is the best medicine. But Jakob the Liar forgets that the hope that Jakob brings to his ghetto is false. Such hope inevitably leads to expectations of its realization and when those expectations aren't met, the results are far worse than if there was no hope. That's the film's biggest detriment: it is based on a false assumption and thus comes off as painfully false. It's never moving because it doesn't give us anything to be moved by. Jakob the Liar fails to tug any heartstrings which destroys its purpose for existing.
Robin Williams doesn't inject the film with life, as a matter of fact, he seems a little out of it, as if crippled by his fake accent. He is stragely unenthusiastic; his character is one who spreads hope but his performance is lifeless, hopeless. Not since Good Will Hunting has he abandoned his signature style to this extent; this isn't the Robin Williams we know and love. In Good Will Hunting he became a serious actor and won an Oscar for it. Here, he is more of a wannabe serious actor; an impostor.
Jakob the Liar will be compared with last year's Life is Beautiful because it is being marketed as a "Holocaust comedy". It's not a comedy. It tries, sometimes, but it rarely works. Is it a melodrama? A war movie? A character study? No, no, and no. Jakob the Liar is the kind of movie that can't be placed into a category; not because it covers so many different genres but because it fails at just about every one it attempts.
Grade: C-
©1999 Eugene Novikov‰
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