If you live anywhere near New York City, save the money you might have spent on popcorn and the film rendition of War Horse, which galloped into movie theaters just in time for the predictable Oscar nominations. Race out instead to catch the play, which won five Tony awards in 2011, including best play.

Seeing the play and the film in close proximity reminds us of the magic that great theater can create, as opposed to most expensive, even well-crafted movies. Why are we moved more by the plight of a horse puppet than by a snorting and bucking horse in the flesh? The answer lies in the transformative power of theater, which, like great literature, stirs the imagination.

This Broadway play is everything that the Hollywood movie is not. The play is gritty, clear, nuanced, deeply moving, and intensely anti-war. “Here’s what war did,” wrote the book’s author, Morpurgo. “It burned flesh. It killed my uncle. It made my mother weep.” Its film counterpart allows that war may be noisy and dangerous but remains somehow noble. Good and bad people die in the play. In Spielberg’s saga, almost no one dies. While the play is ambitious and majestic, Spielberg’s War Horse is sentimental schlock—which is what this talented, skilled narrator has increasingly been dishing out of late.

The genius of the play is not the plot. National Velvet, the 1944 Liz Taylor vehicle, had more twists and subtlety. War Horse is, after all, a children’s fable, set in Devon, England, just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The story is fairly straightforward: Boy meets horse as newborn foal; boy falls for horse, whom he names Joey; boy tames and trains horse to pull a plow, something that Joey, a thoroughbred, was not born to do; boy loses horse to World War I conscription; boy goes off to war in search of horse. (You will have to see the play to learn if boy and horse survive and are reunited.)

The stage play is brilliantly adapted from the book by Nick Stafford in association with the Handspring Puppet Company. Its human characters are real. Their cruelty and flaws and the pain they inflict, deliberately and unconsciously, are poignantly evoked by a magnificent cast, directed with finesse and discipline by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, with Toby Sedgwick providing what is called “horse choreography.” Particularly memorable is Boris McGiver, as Ted Narracott, the stubbornly proud, often inadvertently cruel father of Seth Numrich, who stars as son Albert. In one of many drunken moments, Ted nearly loses the family farm by buying the thoroughbred colt instead of the plow horse the family needs just to one-up his well-to-do brother. Later on, he sneaks out of his house to sell his son’s beloved horse into cavalry service to stave off having to lose the family farm. The Narracott family’s desperation, of course, is born of Ted’s drinking, his foolish pride, and crushing poverty. Numrich gives a powerful performance as young Albert, whom we see transformed from an innocent boy into an agile young man and then into a somewhat hapless soldier whose devotion to his horse often seems stronger than to his drunken father, his family, or his country. Who can blame him? The British and German soldiers in this play are not archetypes, but complex characters, some of whom love horses and their fellow men, and others who relish brutalizing them.

In a uniformly superb cast, Peter Hermann gives a particularly stirring performance as Friedrich Muller, a German soldier who assumes a dead medical officer’s identity to save himself and Joey from having to go to the front and almost certain death. There is no glory or flag-waving in this play, and virtually no politics, just a desire by man and beast alike to survive. We are reminded that this was the world’s longest and most pointless of conflicts, in which an estimated 17 million soldiers and civilians, not to mention millions of horses, died.

In one particularly vivid scene, Joey confronts the future’s iron horse—the merciless tank, portrayed as lines drawn on a screen, against which the puppet horse rears pathetically, a portent of a century of mechanized wars to come.

Though a child’s story, War Horse is no play for children. Only at its conclusion does the play succumb to a childlike desire for happy endings. Not so the movie version. Spielberg stands the play’s anti-war message on its head. The British countryside has never looked so green or beautiful. There are sweeping panoramic shots of the fields and hills straight out of The Sound of Music and How Green Was My Valley. Spielberg never shows the grinding poverty of the play’s Narracott farm, or the desperate struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent. Even his occasionally arresting depiction of the guts, gore, and gas of trench warfare, the true horrors of World War I, has soft edges. His characters are more caricatures than people; Ted Narracott, for instance, is a sweet, well-intentioned drunken ex war-hero, not the play’s blustering, irresponsible wreck of a man whose alcoholism repeatedly threatens his family with ruin.

Almost no one dies in the movie version. And those who do are such thinly drawn caricatures that it is almost impossible to mourn their passing. Amazingly, all the characters speak marvelous English with country-appropriate accents—the two German boys who are shot rather offhandedly for desertion; a young French girl with an ill-defined illness; her doting, jam-making philosopher grandfather; the Germans who raid their farm. The one death that has dramatic punch is that of Topthorn, a huge black stallion whom Joey befriends at war. Topthorn is literally worked to death, starved and exhausted by pulling ambulances and finally artillery up muddy hills.

The most dramatic moment in both the play and the film is Joey’s frantic bolt for freedom through a bleak, battle-scarred no-man’s land, where he eventually entangles himself in ribbons of barbed wire that drag him down and nearly kill him. This is vintage Spielberg (but once again, more creatively portrayed on stage). But even this moving moment of true pathos is followed by a dud of a scene—an unconvincing truce between Germans and the English as a soldier from each side rises from his mud-filled trench to help free poor Joey from the wire. (In Spielberg’s production, we are quickly assured, the wire was made of rubber so that no horses would be harmed in production. Ditto, the wounds on the horses, which were the work of the film’s makeup artists—or, as they appear in the credits, the film’s “equine hair and make-up” unit.) But such episodes are few and far between in this seemingly endless, 146-minute epic, whose sentimentality is reinforced by John Williams’ sumptuous, omnipresent score, which swells over farms, fields, and battlefields. The play, by contrast, uses folk tunes mainly as punctuation.

There is plenty of what film buffs call “homage” in this Spielberg saga. An overhead shot of human and horse corpses littering the battlefield as the camera pans the scene of slaughter seems straight out of Gone With The Wind. Remember the iconic scene of the dead and dying in Atlanta’s railway station? So, too, is Spielberg’s shot of a hill overlooking the Narracott family farm as three main characters embrace in silhouette against a bright orange, Technicolor sky. Oh to be at Tara! Or, back at the Beaumont, or for that matter, just about anyplace else.

Playwright J.T. Rogers, the young author of Blood and Gifts, is obsessed with history. This is his third historical play—all of which have been critically if not commercially successful. And you don’t have to be an Afghan expert—or even deeply pro- or anti-America’s war in a land where “wartorn” is a gross understatement—to enjoy Rogers’ original, compelling play. But those who have followed the war closely will get more of his grim jokes and more easily track the play’s cast of warlords and their ever-shifting alliances.

This is a complex, politically subtle play without a simple message. It succeeds because it raises the most profound questions about how men of such good intentions—and all the major characters are male—could have gotten things so terribly wrong while seeming to get them right. Americans helped the Soviets in the decade the play examines, 1979 to 1989, when the spy services of the United States, Britain, and Russia were replaying the “Great Game,” the centuries-long power struggle in this historic crossroads. But the victory soon turns sour, as civil war erupts among the Western-armed Afghan war lords, after which the Pakistani-supported Taliban usher in yet more barbarous intolerance.

At a discussion with members of the Council on Foreign Relations after a performance last week, Bartlett Sher, whose disciplined, crisp direction maximizes the play’s emotional punch, said he believes that a dramatist’s role is not to preach for or against U.S. involvement in this 8-year-old war but to prompt an audience to “pose the question.”

Blood and Gifts makes you wonder how Americans failed to see that helping the Afghans expel the Soviets would strengthen the militant Islamists who would then target Americans once the Russians were gone. After the Islamic revolution in Iran, why did Washington not see that stoking religious fervor for short-term gain would end badly? Why did the United States let Pakistan decide which war lords to bless with U.S. “gifts”—increasingly sophisticated weapons that would soon be aimed at Afghans of other tribes, ethnicity, and religious beliefs and then at Americans? Why did the CIA think it had no further obligation to the Afghan people once the Russians were ousted?

But the play’s fictional characters raise questions beyond politics, among them, how could men who have worked so closely together for so long understand one another so little?

The play opens in 1979 with the arrival in Islamabad of the absolutely American James Warnock, a CIA veteran of Iran, whose mission is to arrange an alliance with Col. Afridi of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the Pakistan Army’s notoriously treacherous intelligence arm. The idea is to supply U.S. money and arms to anti-Soviet Afghans without American fingerprints. But what Warnock calls “deniability, first and foremost” gives Pakistan a dangerous upper hand in the relationship. Simon Craig, Warnock’s British counterpart, a regionally savvy, whiskey-swilling junior partner in this mission, warns Warnock that Afridi’s determination to channel the weapons to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—the Islamist fanatic who is now targeting American forces in Afghanistan—will backfire, given his penchant for wanton and savage treatment of Afghans who oppose his fanatical interpretation of Islam. As insurance, Warnock opens his own secret channel to the more secular Abdullah Khan, a warlord who appears to become not merely an ally of convenience but Warnock’s friend.

Rogers’ characters learn painful lessons in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Washington, the play’s three venues. Warnock comes to understand how hard it is to know men of another culture. Simon, his MI6 counterpart, learns that Americans can be just as devious and cynical as their Pakistani and Afghan allies. Afghans, as Simon tries warning his American partner, are “charming, semi-civilized and utterly untrustworthy”—“French, without the food.” And all the characters learn that even close friends and allies are rarely what they seem. “Secrets,” Simon says ruefully, “they do … corrode,” along with trust.

Simon turns out to be Jewish, a fact he does not advertise given the region’s prejudices and politics, but of which the insidiously anti-Semitic Afridi repeatedly reminds him.

Rogers’ play provides plenty of heartbreak, personal and political. His key characters all end up with some sorrow, professional as well as personal. Perhaps because, as Rogers observes, Russians seem to excel at suffering, and perhaps because the Western “victory” over the Soviets is the occasion for the Afghan sideshow destined to go terribly awry, Rogers has given a truth-telling role to Dmitri Gromov, a Soviet not-so-secret agent who strikes up a friendship of convenience with Warnock, whom he is charged with watching.

The cast is as sharp as the play’s dialogue. The gifted Jeremy Davidson plays Warnock perfectly—his controlled but confident gait and steely reserve mask to all but the closest of friends the pain of an earlier failure and professional uncertainty. Jefferson Mays is unforgettable as Simon, whose piercing irony about Middle Eastern and Whitehall politics gives the play humor and depth. Michael Aronov plays Gromov, whose Russian humor, as he confesses to Warnock, takes the form not of “ha-ha” jokes but of the Slavic “let me put a stick in your eye because life is not worth living” variety. Gabriel Ruiz is utterly believable as the slimy, corrupt Islamist sympathizing Col. Afridi. And Bernard White as Afghan warlord Abdullah Khan has a twinkle in his eye and an elegance about him that is destined to break one’s heart. John Procaccino, as Walter Barnes, Warnock’s CIA colleague, must have spent weeks at Langley learning how to impersonate an agency bureaucrat flawlessly, and Robert Hogan, as Sen. Jefferson Birch, gives another sterling smaller performance as the passionate southern senator who despite his vapid political platitudes is nobody’s fool. Special tribute must also be paid to Deborah Hecht, the play’s dialect coach, for her versatility in several languages.

Such a coach would have been of value to the cast of another historical drama—Captors, which closed over the weekend after a limited run. But the cast’s struggle with Israeli and German accents was only one of this potentially powerful play’s problems.

Evan M. Wiener’s play is an account of the 10 days that a team of young Mossad and Shin Bet agents spent with Adolf Eichmann in a safe house in the 1960s after his capture in Buenos Aires and before he was smuggled out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel.

Continue reading: ‘Captors’

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired by Lehman’s book, produced by Hal Willner, and starring Rufus Wainwright and others—takes place tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

American Classics With a Yiddish Accent [Soundcheck]
A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

To judge how greatly Israeli cinema has changed, and how greatly it needed to, consider that the Film Society of Lincoln Center recently showed a retrospective in honor of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, comprised exclusively of pictures from the past seven years. I think this chronological limit is a little strict. As the people at the Film Society know, you could program a substantial Israeli series going back, perhaps, to 1992. But as most cinephiles would agree, stretching from there to 1948 lies a celluloid desert, where the good films seem as rare, and as wondrous, as rocks that give water.

This was the paradox of Israeli cinema: Jews had achieved so much in film industries elsewhere in the world, yet took so long to do much of anything within their own state. That the wait is now over seems unquestionable. At home, the commercial success of Israeli film is unprecedented. In 2000, almost nobody in Israel went to see Israeli cinema; out of a total of ten million movie tickets sold, 9,964,000 were for foreign films. Today, Israeli movies sell a million tickets a year. Abroad, the critical success of recent Israeli film is equally impressive, with Or (2004) and Jellyfish (2007) both winning the award for best first film at the Cannes festival, The Syrian Bride (2004) taking awards at Locarno and Montreal, and Beaufort (2007) winning the Silver Bear at Berlin. Now that Waltz with Bashir has gained strong reviews (and international distribution) at the most recent Cannes festival, it’s a good time to ask: Why was Israeli film so slow to develop? And what conditions had to be satisfied before it could flourish?

Scene from Beaufort

The answer to the first question begins with a problem of scale. Whereas people talk about national cinemas, you don’t hear much about, say, the cinema of Chicago. It’s possible for Chicago to have a theater scene, but a city of three million, by itself, would struggle to sustain an art form that’s as labor and capital intensive as film. For the first dozen years of its existence, Israel had about half the population of Chicago—and a high percentage of those people were engaged in agriculture.

So Israeli film started out with a structural handicap, but it also was hobbled ideologically. From the earliest days of film production in the yishuv, Zionism regarded film primarily as a propaganda tool. There is nothing unusual about that—everywhere you look in the twentieth century, you find political movements and governments using film to promote their agendas. The first notable fiction film produced in Israel was solidly in this tradition: the military drama Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955). Because Israel had so little resident filmmaking expertise, the producers had to import much of the talent for this picture, including a British director, Thorold Dickinson. Although he was a gentile, Dickinson was deeply committed to the State of Israel—a circumstance that makes his view of the production all the more telling: “These very right-wing people had written this script…. Highly nationalistic types, and I wouldn’t let any of their ideas into it.”

That’s how it went, during the long Age of Leon Uris. And even once Israeli filmmakers began to turn out a greater number of entertainments, they still liked retelling the national story, in a way that would lift the heart if not rouse the martial spirit. So, in 1964, Israeli cinema produced one of its early breakthroughs, Sallah Shabbati, a comedy by Ephraim Kishon about a North African Jewish family that had been brought to the safety of Israel. You could read the film as a clever inversion of the myth of heroic Israel, in which the charmingly shiftless Sephardim are made more sympathetic than the Ashkenazim who had rescued them. The twist, of course, is that the Sephardim finally learn to be Israeli heroes themselves.

Poster for Sallah Shabbati

Out of Sallah Shabbati came a lineage of lesser Israeli films: comedies of misbehavior and reassurance, which often involved some form of reconciliation between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. And Sallah Shabbati was important in another way as well: It launched the career of the producer Menachem Golan, who with his partner Yoram Globus would go on to make, among other films, Kazablan, Lemon Popsicle, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, Death Wish II, Ninja III, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, Superman IV, Death Wish V, and, of course, Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, starring Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, and Molly Ringwald. In the 1970s and ’80s, despite the occasional Beyond the Walls—a tough-minded prison drama, involving both Israelis and Palestinians—the world’s working definition of “Israeli cinema” was Golan-Globus Productions.

So how did Israel progress from this kind of filmmaking toward a cinema that is now respectable, and even admired?

I think it took a conjunction of three factors. First, Israel had to develop a film culture—one that was aware of international cinema and its artistic possibilities. Second, it needed filmmakers who were determined to be a part of this international cinema, not on a commercial but on an artistic plane. For short, we’ll call them auteurs. And third, it needed to create institutions that would support these filmmakers. In retrospect, we can see that all three of these factors coalesced in the years between 1979 and 1981—by coincidence, between the time of the Camp David agreement and the first Lebanon War.

The turning point for establishing a film culture came in 1981, when Lia van Leer founded the Jerusalem Cinematheque. For her, this was the culmination of a quarter-century of effort. Beginning in the early 1950s, when she and her husband Wim had started showing films in their home in Haifa, van Leer traveled to international festivals, bought prints, founded an Israel Film Archive, set up a Tel Aviv film club, and established the Haifa Cinematheque. At last came the decisive institutions: the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and in 1984 its offshoot, the Jerusalem Film Festival. The principal film and television school in Israel, named for the American producer Sam Spiegel, was founded in Jerusalem only a few years after the Festival. If you want to know how Israel became the only country in the world where Andrei Tarkovsky is a popular filmmaker, the answer comes down to Lia van Leer.

For the birth of the Israeli auteur, the key date was 1980. That was when a twenty-nine-year-old former architecture student from Haifa, Amos Gitai, persuaded Israeli television to let him make a film titled House. This was his first feature-length work: a documentary about the renovation of a private residence in Jerusalem for its new Jewish owner, starting with images of Palestinian construction workers coming in from the West Bank at dawn, and finishing with a visit to the house by the elderly Palestinian doctor who had lived in it until 1948. When the producers saw what they’d bought, they not only declined to broadcast the film, they confiscated it. However, the wily and determined Gitai had the foresight to have retained a videotape transfer of House, which he carried around to festivals in Europe.

Eran Riklis directing Clara Khoury in The Syrian Bride

So an act of censorship launched the career of Israel’s first auteur—a filmmaker who wanted to be known both for a critical engagement with his world, and for an intelligent, self-aware approach to the formal problems of filmmaking. I can’t say that Gitai has always succeeded, but by being prolific and adventurous and intermittently brilliant, he gave Israel its first consistent presence on the international circuit, and provided an example that many others would follow.

For the third crucial element—institutional support—the key date is 1979, when the Israel Film Fund went into operation. Its progress was slow; from 1979 through 1992, the organization funded an average of only three to five films a year. But then, in the early 1990s, came a sudden expansion of activity, made all the more remarkable by the challenging nature of the movies the Fund was willing to support. In recent years, these have included, to mention just a few, Gitai’s harsh dramas of ultra-Orthodox life and military service, Kadosh and Kippur; Joseph Cedar’s troubling tale of a family drawn toward the settlers’ movement, Campfire; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s sad and satirical fable of immigrant, non-Jewish labor, James’s Journey to Jerusalem; Eytan Fox’s breakthrough, gay-themed films, such as Walk on Water; Eran Riklis’s melancholy comedy of a Druze family divided by a border, The Syrian Bride; and even features by Elia Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now), extraordinary Palestinian filmmakers from Nazareth. The Age of Leon Uris clearly had ended. The fact that a government agency helped bring it to a close is a testament to the seriousness, intelligence, and democratic spirit that can be found, despite everything, in Israel.

I can give the same praise to the New Foundation for Cinema & TV, which the government established in 1993. Like the Fund, the Foundation has supported extraordinarily challenging films—in this case, almost all of them documentaries. But this funding has been useful to fiction film production, since many notable Israeli directors, such as David Ofek and Alexandrowicz, have jumped between the two modes.

The introduction of cable and commercial television in the 1990s provided another kind of subsidy for Israeli film artists: regular work. A director such as Nir Bergman can now go back and forth between film, with Broken Wings, and episodic television, with In Treatment. More recently, another important development has been the success of the Israel Film Fund in securing co-production money, especially from France, Germany, Canada, and Australia.

Scene from James’s Journey to Jerusalem

The cash is useful in itself. Perhaps even more useful is the overseas distribution that accompanies it.

So the old paradox of Israeli film has been laid to rest, and new paradoxes have taken its place. Israeli film has become more commercially viable by being more artistic. It has become truer to itself by being more international. It has become more self-assured by being more critical.

The strongest evidence of these changes is to be found not in the box-office reports or the lists of awards, but in the films themselves, such as Alexandrowicz’s James’s Journey to Jerusalem. In that movie, the character of the cynical, conniving old Sephardic father is named Sallah—in homage, the director has said, to Sallah Shabbati. Israeli film can now be self-referential—which means that Israeli film must now, at last, exist.

They are a Jewish American nightmare, these Bergers, real enough to make a reader flinch. Their niggling fears are all on the surface, exposed like cockroaches under a sink: eviction, starvation, shame. Bessie’s worldview is all the more frightening because even when her actions are despicable, her logic is sound: “Here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye. Talk from now to next year—this is life in America.”

Clifford Odets, 1935

Odets’ actor-collaborators at the two-year-old Group Theatre initially rejected the play, finding the Bergers not so much embattled as flat-out coarse. Odets had tailored the script, originally called I Got the Blues, to members of the Group with whom he worked and sometimes lived, but they nonetheless objected to its “rather gross Jewish humor” and “messy kitchen sink naturalism.” Two years later, when another producer wanted the play and the Group Theatre was desperate for material (and probably worried about losing all those good parts), they agreed to mount a revised version, with fewer Yiddish references and a more hopeful title, after Isaiah 26:19, “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.”

By the time Awake and Sing! opened, Odets had rocketed from junior-level actor to the Group Theatre’s primary voice. His Waiting for Lefty, in which a taxi strike heralds revolution, caused a populist sensation, sparking a 45-minute curtain call on opening night, January 5, 1935. Even so, the Group had a hard time raising the money for Awake and Sing! and was able to produce the play only because of a steady stream of profits from Lefty, which continued to run in New York and spread to more than 60 cities within a year. Awake and Sing! was respectably but tentatively reviewed in 1935, then lauded as an American classic upon its revival as part of the Group’s repertory in 1939.

What happened in four years to change the reception of this story about a Jewish family whose moral values are all but lost in the clutches of life in the Bronx? It may have been Odets’ new prominence (he made the cover of Time in December of 1938) that caused a critic such as Brooks Atkinson to revise his opinion of the play. Or perhaps the shift from the Depression into wartime allowed the audience some distance from the circumstances of the Bergers’ lives. I suspect, too, that the play’s Jewish focus, disquieting in 1935 when Yiddishkeit was not often seen uptown, might have seemed more sympathetic, moving, or at least intriguing to audiences by 1939.

At the crux of Awake and Sing! is a premise that people get twisted away from their destinies by the conditions of their lives, that poverty blocks the soul. This suggests a different reality, and even a different aesthetic stance, from the dramas of Odets’ immediate predecessor Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill’s heroes tend to be romantics or addicts who refuse to allow facts to change who they are, even when that denial leads to madness or death. A decade after Odets, Tennessee Williams, too, would wring tragedy from delusion. In fact, most great American central characters insist on a haze that suffuses the plays themselves: Blanche’s dim lighting, or the morphine twilight of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

By contrast, the Bergers operate cold sober. Even the fierce idealism that Jacob imparts to his grandson Ralph is rooted in a hard look at Jacob’s own failings: “Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution. But you should act. Not like me. A man who had golden opportunities but drank instead a glass tea.”

Ralph, “a boy with a clean spirit,” yearns for a pair of black-and-white shoes, his own bedroom, and a chance to fix his teeth. He takes up his grandfather’s worldview, but only the Marxist part, ignoring the biblical foundations that support the title line. It seems that Jacob’s Hebrew and religious learning will die with him, as no one in the family reacts to his blessings or quotes. Ralph instead hears Jacob’s plea to make a world in which poor people can control their fates, a world in which “life isn’t printed on dollar bills.”

Stella Adler in Awake and Sing!, 1935

The people in Awake and Sing! need money. They need it badly. They live crammed together, and familiarity makes them vicious. They scrabble; they scrape; they cheat. They con one another out of coins, favors, and track winnings. They are dishonest, unhappy, and sometimes cruel. They wield whatever power they have with as much grit as they can muster, which is a lot. Bessie, the matriarch who claims, “Here I’m not only the mother but also the father,” is the hardest-edged and sharpest-eyed of all.

Odets describes Bessie one way and dramatizes her another. He writes, “She is constantly arranging and taking care of her family,” a generous gloss on such measures as pawning off her pregnant daughter in marriage to an unsuspecting immigrant. Bessie intercepts calls from Ralph’s girlfriend and then lies about it, because she counts on Ralph’s $16-a-week salary and doesn’t want him to marry. When Ralph confronts her, Bessie reverts to the popular Jewish grammatical tense my father used to call the Third Person Invisible:

BESSIE: A girl like that he wants to marry. A skinny consumptive-looking…. You should see her. In a year she’s dead on his hands.
RALPH: You’d cut her throat if you could.
BESSIE: That’s right! Before I’d ruin a nice boy’s life I would first go to prison.

The author tells us that Bessie “loves life, likes to laugh, has great resourcefulness and enjoys living from day to day.” It’s a kind appraisal of a woman who schemes to cheat her own son out of his grandfather’s insurance money.

The difference between how Odets sees Bessie and what she actually does suggests that the person in the opening description has been warped by the plotline of her own life. In another situation, maybe Bessie Berger would seem to love life, and maybe we’d even hear her laugh. But on Longwood Avenue she is a small-time hustler in her own home, steering the family’s narrow course between destitution and outright crime. Her husband, Myron, a dopey store clerk whom Bessie once tried to put through law school, is sweet but no patriarch. Her tycoon brother, Morty, isn’t offering any handouts and in fact literally eats up the family’s resources on his rare visits, when Bessie cooks budget-busting meals that nonetheless fail to meet his millionaire standards:

BESSIE: The best Long Island duck.
MORTY: I like goose.
BESSIE: A duck is just like a goose, only better.

Will Bessie Berger seem softer now, at Odets’ centenary, 70 years after Stella Adler originated the role? Will she be harder to digest, or easier to dismiss? Will Lincoln Center audiences, presumably for the most part a couple generations and a comfortable cushion removed from the Bronx, relax around Bessie, as if hearing a familiar Jewish-mother joke? Or will her blatant grasping and shrill geshray-ing embarrass, a peek into a culture we’d rather forget?

Bessie Berger could emerge as a huge character, potent enough to stand alongside the most important American female roles. Zoë Wanamaker, a reigning British classical actress with New York Russian Jewish roots, seems an inspired choice. In a Broadway season that highlights Mrs. Lovett, the murderously practical purveyor of meat pies in Sweeney Todd, maybe there’s room for a fierce Jewish lady who challenges the American ideal of motherhood because she sees too clearly to be nice.

Odets’ language is wide awake, and it doesn’t sing so much as snap in unflinching staccato, even in the love scenes. Today, I wonder if the urban specificity of his immigrant dialogue, the bare questions about class and opportunity, might land hard and clear for audiences contemplating a torn social safety net and “petty conditions” that seem anything but trivial. Some of Bessie’s fears, allayed by 70 years of New Deal legislation, seem to be coming home to roost.

It was with great hopes that I went to a screening of the Israeli director’s latest project, Free Zone, about three women—an Israeli, an American, and a Palestinian—wrestling over a business deal. One of its stars, Hanna Laslo, picked up the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her somewhat gruff, can-do performance as a questionably Orthodox matron, the best of the lot. Another is Natalie Portman. That alone guarantees fanfare, and yet star power cannot eradicate the carsick feeling that this film induces.

It is a road movie, after all. There are long tracking shots of highways, most of the action takes place in a taxi, the interactions center around the sales of armored vehicles, and, toward the end, Gitai gives us the trio twirling their wrists and bobbing their heads to a song on the radio in a kind of vehicular camaraderie.

Unless you count a close shot of Portman’s Rebecca crying through Chava Alberstein’s politicized rendition of Had Gadya, nothing much else happens though much is aspired to. That’s the key problem here, admirable though it may be.

Characters offer mini-monologues on their personal tragedies. The Palestinian, played by Hiam Abbass, was dispossessed from Israel and admonishes that it’s good to know the language of the enemy. The Israeli snarks, “Before? Before, my parents came from Auschwitz,” in response to a question of where her parents were located before immigrating. And the American sweetheart seems bathed in a kind of milky mixture of curiosity and dislocation; her mother is not a Jew and she consequently feels rejected by the place she had hoped to consider home.

The lesson—persecution is owned by no one and everyone—is important and quite dear to Gitai, who has built his career examining regional tensions. He started in 1982 with Field Diary, a documentary of his tour through the country, interviewing Israelis and Palestinians about their future, and followed it up three years later with Esther, his first feature. Gitai’s version of the Biblical tale wraps up with shots of the actors silently walking, each narrating their own biographies. A Palestinian plays Mordechai, a Hungarian refugee plays an advisor to King Ahasuerus, portrayed in turn by an actor of Armenian descent. The moving revelation that it’s a colors-of-the-world production compensates but only slightly for enduring the rest of the film.

Certainly, the world can be a cruel place—the Bible shows us that, and lest you need modern evidence, pick up a newspaper. Free Zone is similarly discouraging, and viewers will surely be affirmed in their lamentation over the seeming intractability of the tensions and suffering in the Middle East. After the screening, Gitai said a few words, notably that his hope for the region is that warring people will become so bored by quarreling that they’ll ultimately make peace. Attrition may indeed be a solution, but Gitai’s lack of imagination and well-meaning moralizing do little more than elicit a collective yawn.