‘Treasure’ Review: Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry Play Daughter and Father in a Misfire of a Holocaust Dramedy

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A woman and her Holocaust survivor father go on a trip tracing their family history in Poland in German director Julia von Heinz's film.

Set in 1991, not long after it suddenly became much easier for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to visit sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-French co-productionfollows a father and daughter making exactly this kind of voyage of remembrance. It’s adapted from the comic-tragic novelLars Eidinger Is a Conductor on the Brink in 'Dying' , so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong.

I confess I have not read Brett’s book, but judging by what I can gather about it, a lot of the friction between the two main characters stems from the way Edek, who can speak fluent if rusty Polish, gets along with the locals while Ruth sees nothing but smiling anti-Semites all around her.

Of course characters, just like people in real life, can be a mass of contradictions. But somehow that complexity, that ability to contain completely opposed feelings at once, just doesn’t come across in Fry’s performance, just as Ruth’s contrariness feels gestural, poorly limned in Dunham’s. However much we all love Fry, a certified national treasure in the U.K., he’s never been an actor with much range, and he’s pretty much at his limit here.

 

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