This frustratingly aimless road movie attempts to delve into hereditary trauma and the legacy of the Holocaust. Its well-meaning efforts are undercut by a script that makes the central protagonist completely insufferable. When it was announced that German director Julia von Heinz was going to adapt Australian novelist Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel “Too Many Men”, there was every reason to be excited.
Coming off the back of her Venice-premiering Antifa thriller ( ), von Heinz seemed like the ideal fit for Brett’s novel, a moving, insightful and often comic chronicle of how Ruth, an American businesswoman, brings her father Edek, an Auschwitz survivor, back to Poland to face the past to better confront the future. The 1999 book stands as a thoughtful excavation of history that deals with hereditary trauma and how the legacy of the Holocaust is experienced (or mis-experienced) throughout generations – something von Heinz explored in both and . What a shame that her big screen treatment of Brett’s story waters everything down and singularly fails to capture what made the source material so hauntingly precise yet tragically universal.
More than that, is so frustratingly aimless and at times off-putting it may dissuade those who haven’t read Brett’s book from seeking it out. Any film that pulls off that particular feat can only be considered a failure. stars Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham as the father-daughter pair who embark on this life-changing road trip.
