120 min | R | March 27, 2020 | IFC Films
Before Marcel Marceau becomes the world’s most famous mime, he is a young Jewish art student in France who joins the Resistance and smuggles orphaned children past the Nazis. Jesse Eisenberg plays him with conviction. The movie around him cannot decide what it wants to be.
Marcel is a young Jewish man in Strasbourg who paints his face and performs for nightclub crowds while his father wants him to work the family butcher shop. The Nazi invasion of France ends that argument. Marcel joins a cell of the French Resistance, and his talent for entertaining children becomes a weapon. He uses performance to calm orphaned Jewish kids and shepherd them toward the Swiss border. Jonathan Jakubowicz frames the story as the origin of the man who will become Marcel Marceau, and he wants it to be a war thriller, a coming-of-age story, and a tribute all at once. The film never decides which one matters most.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Marcel with nervous energy that suits a man performing his way through terror. He is most convincing in the quiet scenes with frightened children, where the mime work carries real tenderness. Matthias Schweighöfer plays Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, with a domestic calm that makes the cruelty worse. Clémence Poésy plays Emma, the resistance organizer Marcel loves, and the script hands her devotion and little else. Bella Ramsey plays Elsbeth, a traumatized orphan whose silence anchors the film’s strongest moments. Ed Harris bookends the picture as George S. Patton, narrating Marcel’s heroism to American troops, a framing device that adds gloss and drains tension.
Jakubowicz directs and writes, and the seams of his ambition show in both jobs. The cinematography favors burnished golds and deep shadows that turn occupied France into a handsome period postcard instead of a place of danger. The score swells under nearly every emotional beat and tells the audience how to feel before the scene earns it. The editing rushes through years and locations, compressing the smuggling operations into montage when the details would carry more weight. A torture sequence and a climactic confrontation expose the same instinct. Jakubowicz reaches for visceral horror and then retreats into tasteful restraint.
The true story is extraordinary, and the film knows it. That knowledge becomes the problem. Resistance treats Marceau’s heroism as self-evidently moving and forgets to dramatize the cost. The most interesting idea sits right in the premise. A performer who works in silence spends the war keeping children quiet so they can survive. The movie states that irony instead of building around it, and it settles for sincerity when it needs nerve.