Both films and the upcoming Israeli movie Circles, on which more later, are examples of what Sienkiewicsz calls artworks that “map onto the existing genres of Jewish American literature”, that is cinematic responses to the Great Jewish American novel.
In the first part of Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty uses aggressive and provocative language to describe the Holocaust. When asked about his Hungarian rival, the Shoah survivor Bela Kletzy, he says he is going to do “what Auschwitz couldn’t”.
The reporters and the viewer are shocked, but Marty says he’s allowed to say this because he’s the “ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat”. Put another way, he embodies the cocky and assertive Jewish identity of 1950s America. Post-Holocaust humour is something Jews normally share between themselves but this film dares to say it out loud. It depicts Jewish identity in a way that has traditionally been the preserve of literature.
As Esther Zuckerman put it in her review of the film for the New York Times: “For some viewers the movie’s relationship to Marty’s Jewishness, the portrayal of a ruthlessly ambitious American Jew, borders on the antisemitic. For others, including myself, it is one of the great Jewish movies, an unapologetic depiction of the Jewish American experience in all its complications.”
Similarly, acclaimed Israeli novelist and scholar of Jewish-American literature Matan Hermoni, argues that Safdie’s Uncut Gems, whose protagonist is played by Adam Sandler, offers the audience an anti-hero, that is both lovable and hated at the same time, just as literary Jewish protagonists such as Philip Roth’s lust-ridden bachelor Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint and Bellow’s Moses E. Herzog in Herzog do.
At a time where the hero of a Jewish novel can be a desk (Nicole Krauss’s Great House), it is refreshing to see real, old literary-style Jewish characters on the silver screen. “You can despise him or he can despise himself. But he is a full, rounded character,” says Hermoni.
.jpg?f=3x2&w=732&q=0.6)
Immigrant story: The Brutalist[Missing Credit]
Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems[Missing Credit]
“He has sudden qualms like “Swede” Levov in Roth’s American Pastoral and all other great American-Jewish novels of the past.
“You don’t really find this any more in contemporary Jewish-American literature that is very ‘nice’ and easy to digest and does not challenge the reader in the way these films challenge the viewer.”
Contemporary Jewish American literature does not challlenge the reader in the way these films challenge the viewer
Sienkiewicz also argues that Marty Supreme is almost a throwback to a time when ordinary people “cared about” novels and read them in the way they now consume film. “In some ways, the world of novels and the world of cinema have intercepted over the past decades. Bellow’s Augie March sold a few million copies and while Marty Supreme has been seen by more people than that, not that many more. The film very much appeals to an educated, urban and disproportionality Jewish audience – the film has been watched in cities in far greater numbers than in rural areas – and this describes very well the readers of the great Jewish novelists of the post-war era who were also disproportionately Jewish.” Why, though, in this antisemitic moment, are Jewish stories getting a billing on the silver screen?
As well as the epics such as The Brutalist and Marty, we have had the vintage melancholia of Between the Temples and last year’s comedy Bad Shabbos, for example.
“Well, while the number of cinemagoers has reduced significantly, Jewish film festivals have maintained their audiences [and this helps Jewish films get made]. The small Jewish novel, if you like, and the small Jewish film have have a staying power and ready-made audience and, at the same time, these big, broad and more adventures Jewish films appeal to a former book-reading public”.
Cantor's tale: Jason Schwartzman in Between the Temples[Missing Credit]
Family comedy: a scene in Bad Shabbos[Missing Credit]
That said, Sienkiewicz also believes that it to be no coincidence that both Marty and The Brutalist are set in the 1940s and 1950s, that is before 1967, after which Israel and Jewish-Israeli identity became so politically charged. They are set in the immediate post-war period when Jewish identity could be explored with little fear. The climate today, it hardly needs stating, is very different.
“There are many legitimate concerns,” he says. “Well-founded fear about one’s physical security and big concerns about the social cost of expressing Jewishness.
“There is only one country in the world where you can make films about contemporary Jewish identity and not pay for it in some way: Israel. Nadav Lapid’s films, which explore personal identity and societal anger in Israel and Phinehas Veuillet’s Neither Day or Night in which a Sephardi family tries to integrate into a Charedi Ashkenazi community in Bnei Brak, are cases in point. They are made in Israel but distributed outside it. And I think we will see more of this in the years to come.
Tom Shoval, one of Israel’s most acclaimed contemporary directors, agrees that Marty the Supreme,The Brutalist, Uncut Gems and Licorice Pizza, as well as the television series The Curse and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, represent the rebirth of the great Jewish novel on screen. But he sees the phenomenon as part of a wider crisis in cinema that today must compete with the large scale TV series of the Netflix era such as Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Succession and The Rehearsal.
Coming of age the Jewish way: Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza[Missing Credit]
Film-makers are, he says, searching for new ways to create the feeling of a lengthy, bigger-than-life epic, that allow for more in-depth development of the story’s main characters. The Brutalist and Uncut Gems are epic in both scale and length. To recapture audiences, Shoval believes that “auteur” directors need to do more of this. And the directors need not be Jewish. “Film-makers like Tarantino with Inglourious Basterds or Paul Thomas Anderson with Licorice Pizza have Jewishness embedded in them. They got inside the Jewish psyche as if they want to be part of this grand opera. The Jewish story, Jewish literature, gives a brilliant opportunity to combine both intimate family stories with a large-scale bigger-than-life epics, even if they are told in a minimalist manner as in The Brutalist.
While the nostalgic Licorice Pizza, set in 1970s Los Angeles, tells a love story involving the Jewish beauty Alana Kane (played by the Jewish singer and actress Alana Haim), Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds serves as the ultimate Jewish revenge story and was, in many aspects, the forerunner to the wave of films we have seen these past few years, and which we will see again in upcoming Israeli historical war drama Circles, which is due to be released this year. Directed by the widely acclaimed Jewish-Mexican Michel Franco, who wrote the script together with Tom Shoval, the film is based on the real-life story of Meir Har Zion, one of Israel’s most famous (or, for some, notorious,) war heroes. Shot in atmospheric black and white and set in Israel in the early 1950s, Circles follows the story of siblings Shoshana and Meir Har Zion and the “circles” of violence, as Franco would see it, between Unit 101, an independent special forces section of the IDF formed under the command of Ariel Sharon and various Arab factions.
Looking at Shoval’s recent catalogue of films – including June Zero, which he wrote with Jake Paltrow (Gwyneth Paltrow’s brother), and which is set against the backdrop of Adolf Eichmann’s trial and execution and filmed in the Jewish state – begs the question of whether Israel will be where the Great Jewish Films of the future will be made.
Israeli film-makers are dealing with the aftermath of October 7, that means we will want to tell our own stories hereon
“I don’t know” says Shoval. “Israeli cinema really struggles now with funding even for small-scale minor films, but I think that there is something in the way that Israeli film-makers are dealing with the aftermath of October 7 that means we will want to tell our own stories hereon. Until now we have arguably left it to the Americans to tell our stories on film. It was the American movie maker Otto Perminger who made Exodus, for example. There is no Israeli equivalent but I think there will be in the future – now we want to write our own narrative, to tell our own epic Jewish story on the screen.
