Movie Review: Resistance

Resistance ** / *****

Directed by: Jonathan Jakubowicz.

Written by: Jonathan Jakubowicz.

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg (Marcel), Ed Harris (George S. Patton), Edgar Ramírez (Sigmund), Clémence Poésy (Emma), Matthias Schweighöfer (Klaus Barbie), Bella Ramsey (Elsbeth), Géza Röhrig (Georges), Karl Markovics (Charles), Félix Moati (Alain), Alicia von Rittberg (Regine), Vica Kerekes (Mila), Tobias Gareth Elman (Joseph), Kue Lawrence (Young Marcel).

 

If modern audiences know Marcel Marceau at all these days, it is as the world’s most famous mime – undeniably the last mime that was a household name. Maybe they remember him from Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, where the joke was that the world’s most famous mime was the only one to have a line. They probably don’t know that during WWII, he was active in the French Resistance – helping Jewish children escape from France in Switzerland and safety. Writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz, clearly came across this story, and just felt it was too good to not make a movie of. The problem is though that Resistance is basically a run-of-the-mill Holocaust survival story, just with a mime at its center, and Jakubowicz doesn’t find a way to make it all that interesting – all that different than the dozens of others movie like this we have seen. If the hook here is Marceau, we do get some scenes early of him doing his work in a nightclub – or for the kids – and the climax is Marceau’s first big show for the American troops (brought on stage by General Patton, played by Ed Harris in a performance that makes you think he owed someone a favor), but for the majority of the runtime, it’s a fairly generic story. Jakubowicz also finds a way to graft the story of Klaus Barbie into the movie, and still, the film never becomes very involving.

 

None of this is the fault of Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Marceau in an inspired bit of casting. Eisenberg’s gift as an actor is often his motor mouthed delivery, but here, he proves himself a more than capable mime in the scenes where he needs to show off Marceau’s gifts. If he isn’t who you would immediately think to cast as a mime, well, then, what modern actor would be? Eisenberg is at his best in the early scenes of Resistance – when he is working for his butcher father, hitting on Emma (Clemence Poesy), and doing his nightclub act – all while trying to ignore the growing threat of Hitler and Germany. The movie makes it clear that Marceau cares more about his art than anything else – even if that means he is blithely ignorant of everything else. This is an interesting place to start – but the film soon abandons it. He starts working with the orphans, and then immediately melts, and becomes a humanitarian.

 

Most of the movie is filled with the type of scenes you’ve seen before. Clandestine meetings of resistance members, where they have to find ways to get around the Nazis, scenes of torture and capture, when people cannot get away from them. Scenes of Barbie and his wife – who is apparently horrified when she discovers what he is doing. Scenes of large groups of people trying to make it through the snow covered forests, and hide from the Nazis, etc.

 

None of this is new – nor is it handled all that well here. The film is pretty dull, never really building much of a sense of tension or surprise. Everyone seems to be going through the motions, delivering the type of scenes you expect in this type of movie, instead of the types of scenes you may really want to see in a film about Marcel Marceau taking on Nazis. The film does avoid the trap of say Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Died (supposedly), or Life is Beautiful or Jojo Rabbit, in that it never brings humor and Nazis together. But it doesn’t really do all that much else either. It just kind of sits there on screen – doing not much of anything.