This movie is ambitious and has some big ideas, but ultimately too many big ideas that end up cancelling each other out. It's also very long. At the beginning of the film, I expected it to be a concentration camp survivor's story. And it is that, but it's also more complicated than that. The protagonist (played by Adrian Brody) is gradually revealed to have more layers to his personality than we thought. At first we see him as a refugee at the end of World War II doing grunt work in a relative's small furniture factory to survive, but then we realize that he has a brilliant and creative mind that functions on a much higher level than his worldly position would indicate. He's dependent on other people to survive. At first they appear to be kind benefactors, but then turn out to be really slimy individuals. If anything goes wrong, he's invariably blamed for it, and sent packing. He's given a bad time by virtually everyone. He realizes that, being an outsider, an undesirable foreigner, that he's at an extreme disadvantage. The kindness of strangers turns out to be not-so-kind, after all. But when his former prewar stardom in the field of architecture becomes known, suddenly those who despised him and treated him like garbage, start sucking up to him because they want the prestige of being associated with him. Then there is his sexual impotence, a nascent heroin addiction, and a wife trapped in Europe by the endless bureaucracy of the repatriation process. I don't feel that I could adequately give more details without spoilers.
This turns out to be like QUEER, in that it is highly episodic, and that the episodes do not neatly dovetail together. It's also like QUEER in that, rather puzzlingly, so many of the male characters can't seem to keep their hands off the Brody character, although he never reacts to it. This is a tough movie because there are a lot of good things about it, despite having a plot that simply doesn't hang together. Its biggest assets are the evocative art direction, photography, costumes, and the performances of Brody and the actress who plays his wife. (It's also true that they are given the best material; the other characters are right out of 19th Century melodrama-a sweet orphaned ingenue, a "friend" who leads good people into bad habits, and villains who do every dastardly deed but wear capes and twirl their mustaches.) On the whole, the movie seemed "undeveloped" to me. There's a lot of potential here that was simply unrealized.
