Emotional division

A new post-Holocaust film with a superb cast and great location delivers a less than powerful experience.

The basic premise of this film is promising: three individuals meet 40 years after they were trapped together at a World War II internment camp, and struggle to fit their new sense of reconciliation in their present lives.

Melanie (Susan Sarandon), a troubled woman in her 50s, is caught in a dying marriage to an elderly professor, David Winters (Christopher Plummer). She finds, one day, that the generous gentleman who had saved her from the transit Nazi camp when she was a little girl, is still alive. Greatly relieved at the welcome distraction from her dreary life, she enthusiastically invites the now ageing poet Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), to stay with her at her farm in Quebec. Bronski accepts the invitation but, to her shock, also brings along with him Christopher (Gabriel Byrne), whom he had also saved from the camp. At this meeting, Melanie and Christopher, who had shared an intimate bond as children, find themselves deeply connected even 40 years later, and struggle to react to this unseemly situation.

Watched by a jealous husband and a concerned son, Melanie works her way through this set of men by her side, disturbed while visiting her past time and again, one that she isn’t able to put away. The film plunges into the minds of each of the characters in turn, and one is easily able to empathise with their actions and reactions.

On the whole, however, the film never really takes off. Despite what one would normally think to be an excellent cast, poor screenplay in addition to choppy performances make this film mediocre. There is, naturally, great complexity that comes with victims dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust — for those involved in it directly and indirectly — but the film fails to bring it onto the screen.

Hovering around flashbacks from their childhood, the parallels drawn to Melanie and Christopher’s relationship, then — and now — are jerky and tacky. The gratitude the two express for Bronski’s fatherly love at the camp could have been moving, but remains barely touching. The usually dependable Sarandon is inconsistent as she tries to bring a delicate balance to the bitter yet compassionate character of Melanie, painfully caught between an unfaithful husband she wants to be faithful to, and a childhood sweetheart she continues to have great affection for. Plummer, Sydow and Byrne, in turn, look profoundly uncomfortable in their scenes and are never able to fully grasp the pain of the characters they play.

If anything, Emotional Arithmetic can certainly win prizes for being shot in perhaps the most gorgeous country side — picture perfect, no doubt. But because the location of the filming is static — having being shot almost entirely around the same spot, it calls for the tight, powerful narrative that it lacks, and which could have carried it forward meaningfully.