Fixer (1998)

The movie ‘The Fixer’ shows the step Yakov Bok took to show the public trial he fought for. This comes near the end of the movie where Yakov is persecuted and inspirational music plays whilst he walks into the courtroom. The narrator speaks: “The name is Yakov Bok a Jew, innocent and your brother.”

To me, this statement does seem a bit questionable and personally is a very touchy subject. It is peculiar how the audience has to get spoonfed the moral instead of interpreting it themselves. The film, I believe, had a great plot but did need some improvements and aim for better balance. The rest of the movie had portrayed John Frankenhimer’s belief and proved him right. This scene and particularly the speech was very powerful and intimate after the two hours he had spent giving a convincing introduction of Bok. The speech itself portrays a very direct point and places the audience in an awkward situation.

Frankenheimer tends to portray people in a powerful position and dramatic scenes. In this particular scene we find out that the protagonist was a Jewish man during the final years of decadent Czarist Russia, accusing him of a crime he did not even commit. To top it off the crime was supposedly ritual murder. And to make matters worse, the case was used by the Czar’s deputies to stir up anti-Semitism and distract them from criticizing the government.

Frankenheimer has done an adaptation of the novel by Bernard Malamud which was based on a true story.

Another thing is a historical event, and another is an event depicted in a film. We understood the moral of the recorded availed and he managed to portray it perfectly; this is where he has failed. The film does not possess much inner reality; rather, it is powerful and potent because of the subject matter. Instead of the images depicted, we are appealing the implications of it all.

One would assume the film is commendable with the message it is portraying, I too am trapped in similar compromises. This is the fundamental wrong judgment that led to judging a commercially wrong film Judgment at Nuremberg positively only because there was an anti Nazi sentiment in it. The film shall be accepted as good, not just because it has a positive argument.

In “The Fixer,” where the Soviet case unfolds within the frame of a political thriller, Jones and his co producer, Dalton Trumbo, the writer in s particular and deeply sensitive to the Jews media development have made sure to provide us commentary om what is taking place prima facie and how it is all to be interpreted. Here, too, the victim, which has been played by Alan Bates rather charmingly, not only serves as a Jesus character but goes out of his way to even claim to do so. He makes a little address to his guard about love and brotherhood. Tsar’s representatives also makes it a point to deliver some of their crass motives. The prisoners foolhardiness and courage are freely commented the more. The scope of anti Semitism in human affairs is studied carefully.

So remember that awful inappropriate speech at the very beginning of the ending of the film, where every bit of action takes place during the same time, to make sure that we do not forget the over all claim. It is a type of simple Dragnet contrived circumstantial epilogue that is brought against the general audience as emphasis drama. What was required were greater effort flags uself and self echoed faux noble, verbose, lofty rhetorical, sane, ethical speeches and little of the experience of the real.

He ought to have displayed the agony of his hero amidst the Kafkaesque legal council’s state-sponsored tortures while withholding his diatribe against them. He ought to have trusted readers and viewers to arrive at their own conclusions from the material. He ought to have assumed that the film had the capability to convey those arguments without much pejorative prose. Above all, he ought to have had faith in Alan Bates whose portrayal is so empathetic that any profundity could have been derived from that character without the aid of all those unnecessary speeches.

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