Just An Ordinary Jew

Journalist Emanuel Goldfarb is an assimilated Jew who has become a well-respected essayist in modern Hamburg. When he receives an earnest request from a local schoolteacher to speak to a group of students about what it means to be Jewish in today’s Germany, it triggers a private emotional avalanche. Pacing in his apartment during a sleepless night, Goldfarb wrestles with his deep ambivalence about appearing as “Exhibit A” in a German classroom: a real, live Jew in the well-meaning, politically correct country that nearly wiped out his entire people. Just an Ordinary Jew is not a typical film in any way, but most startlingly because it is virtually a one-man show, a tour-de-force monologue running nearly 90 minutes. Ben Becker’s Goldfarb, arguing with himself into a microcassette recorder, is angry, caustic, wounded and humane — a brilliant portrait of a man who wants, ostensibly, to be nothing more than “just an ordinary Jew” but who cannot escape the extraordinary circumstances of history. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose Oscar-nominated Downfall dramatized the last days in Hitler’s bunker, once again chooses to work in tight quarters and with an even smaller cast, nonetheless creating a film with pent-up fury, wit and remarkable dynamic range. But the project owes its power to Swiss-born Charles Lewinsky’s fiercely articulate screenplay, which roams across the rocky terrain of modern German Jewish identity with the kind of restless intellectual energy of a rant: part Tony Kushner, part Spalding Gray, but with a very contemporary German accent.