TREASURE - Mark Reviews Movies

Treasure, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2024

The daughter wants to know, and the father just wants to forget. That's the central conflict of Treasure, a story that almost succeeds as an intimate drama about the philosophical divide between its main characters. The subject over which they're divided, though, demands a broader, more thoughtful view than the limited one provided by director Julia von Heinz and John Quester's screenplay.

Directly, that subject is the Holocaust, because Edek (Stephen Fry) is the sole surviving member of his family, following their forced relocation into the Warsaw Ghetto and, finally, the death camps of Nazi-occupied territory. In the movie's setting, this was decades ago, as it's 1991 and Poland, only recently part of the Soviet Union, is an independent country once again.

Edek's daughter Ruth (Lena Dunham), a New York City-based journalist, has arranged a trip to Poland, hoping that her father will take her through their family's history. When Edek misses his first flight to eat at a fast-food restaurant and shop at a bookstore in the airport, it's the first sign that he wants to avoid any conversation about the topic.

The tension between these characters is palpable, regardless of how gregarious Edek might seem at almost every step of the journey. That's just his way—talking about everything and anything, except the one thing that has never left his mind and likely never will, with a big smile. Ruth doesn't understand it. Her earliest and most frequent memories are of her mother, who died about a year ago, screaming in the night. At one point here, she tells her father that she had always known something horrible had happened to her parents, even if neither of them ever spoke of it. Ruth needs him to now, lest the personal history of her family is lost to time.

This aspect of the movie, adapted from Lily Brett's novel Too Many Men, is treated with a delicate balance. It understands Ruth's desire to uncover and reclaim what has been lost, even if the character's own life beyond the trip feels forced into the material. It's more insightful in the ways Edek has established multiple defenses against the horrors of his memory and the absences those horrors have created in his life.

Fry's performance allows the character to be funny, because he uses humor and a friendly nature in the face of almost any challenge as way to diminish it, and practical, because he only says—in slightly broken English through his Polish accent—and does what will keep things stable. Beneath all of that, though, the actor allows us to see that his attitude and behavior is a thin veil, holding back the knowledge that his entire life has been defined by death and what could have been.

Dunham is solid here, too. Her Ruth serves as a counter to the father's elusiveness, presenting him with the reality he wants to avoid, and as a reflection of Edek's attitude when it comes to her own life. Ruth may press her father to offer up details about their family's life before the Nazi occupation, their experiences in the ghetto and the death camps, and how he actually feels about losing almost everything and everyone in his life. She's just as evasive as Edek is, though, when it comes to her own feelings about what living with the knowledge of a terrible secret has been, what the inability to talk about it has done to her, and how all of that hidden pain put up a barrier between them.

Von Heniz and Quester, then, have given us a fascinating character and relationship study, as Ruth and Edek travel to his hometown just outside Warsaw, to the factory the family owned, to the apartment—now in disrepair and still occupied by the family that moved in after Edek's was forcefully removed from it—where he grew up, and, finally, to Auschwitz. There, Edek's façade of having control over his memories and emotions (He more or less tries to take over as a guide) cannot stand up to being surrounded by the physical reality of them. There's an undeniable potency to that scene, not only because of Fry's work within it, but also because the filmmakers use the real location.

Along the way to Edek's gradual catharsis and some understanding between the father and daughter, the movie isn't quite as convincing in what it does between the more significant moments. The political and economic landscape of Poland, which is in disarray and confusion following the collapse of the Soviet Union, is important to the story, if only because there's also the underlying question of Edek and others of Jewish descent potentially seeking to reclaim what was stolen from them at the start of the war.

A few scenes hint at or directly address the idea, but there's a complicated and still controversial history of complacency that the movie refuses to approach. As for Ruth's romantic woes back home and Edek's eventual connection to a local woman, they take up more space than feels necessary, especially within the context of the troubled father-daughter relationship and the immensity of what the two characters are confronting.

Those elements remind us that Treasure is inherently restricted in what it can and is willing to examine. As compelling as the central relationship may be, the movie can't escape the gaps that focus leaves unexplored.

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