The best moment in the film, the finest, is their dulled reaction to that fate after years of oppression. But the rest, alas, is Holocaust-film cliche. For long stretches of this slim, distended story, its tedium is another sign of its spuriousness. Williams almost succeeds in governing his usual electric kinesis, trying to give Jakob the tempo of a worn but striving man. Bob Balaban, as the ghetto barber, tries hard to find some truth in his part.
Altruistic fantasy is in the air.
I might have guessed that the first time I would hear William James quoted in a film would be in a Kasdan opus. Mumford is the name of a young psychoanalyst practicing in a Midwest town of the same name, but he is not a native. It has a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Yet Mumford has so ingratiated himself with the town by reason of his warmth that he already has a considerable practice. Another of his patients and pals is Skip, a young fellow skateboarding around town who owns the local big industry, a plant that produces modems.