This past Friday one of Israel’s most internationally acclaimed films, “Broken Wings” (“Knafayim Shvurot”), landed in Manhattan. The winner of nine Israeli Film Academy Awards, three more from the Berlin International Film Festival, plus the Tokyo Grand Prix, this family drama is now set to garner rave reviews stateside, and a few are already in.
J. Hoberman in The Village Voice insists this movie is “eloquent %u2026 and an auspicious debut.” The Onion’s Scott Tobias adds that this import bears “the mark of a great writer [in that] every character, minor or major, seems distinct and fully inhabited, to the point where it’s easy to imagine them existing before the action starts, after it ends, and apart from any plot machinations at all.”
Haifa-born director/writer Nir Bergman, 35, is the man responsible for all this celluloid infatuation. The story, inspired in part by his own family history%u2013Bergman’s parents divorced when he was ten%u2013portrays the Ullman family as they attempt to cope with grief. Nine months earlier, the father, who was allergic to bees, was stung and died. For three months following her husband’s death, Dafna, the mother (renowned Israeli stage actress Orli Zilbershatz-Banai), slept on unwashed sheets so she could remain near her dead husband’s scent. As the film opens, she is back to being a midwife on the night shift.
Each of the four Ullman children respond variously to their father’s death. The 17-year-old daughter Maya (Maya Maron), who plays in a rock group, suddenly finds herself cast into the role of parent, often left to tend the two younger, strong-willed siblings, Ido and Bahr. Maya also has a twin, Yair (Nitai Gvirtz), who makes money by handing out flyers while dressed in a mouse outfit, something he’s done ever since dropping out of school. Yair also suffers from depression.
On top of the sense of loss with which they have to cope, the Ullmans also are thrown into dire economic straits as a result of having lost their father, who was the main breadwinner in the family. Just to use the family car, for example, Dafna has to push it to get it going. Needless to say, they cannot afford any luxuries.
What may strike some American viewers as odd is that in the film’s 80 or so minutes, the Israeli/Arab conflict is never mentioned. In a phone interview, Bergman, who is currently in Los Angeles promoting his film, explained, “It has nothing to do with my personal view of the situation. The fact is that I made a film about a family. This doesn’t mean that my thoughts are not on the peace process. You can think of ‘Broken Wings’ as a statement saying something about the value of life and not politics.
“You know,” continued Bergman, who lives in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend and two twin children, “usually when someone dies in an Israeli film, it will be as a consequence of the war. He will be a hero. I’m saying this family, these people coping, are my heroes right now. Just a small family trying to survive a normal day. You have to understand the economic situation right now in Israel. It is so bad that I guess that this is what’s going to bring peace eventually. Why? Because people understand that this impossible economic situation is connected to what’s happening in politics. The word on the street is that people are much more than ready for peace, and I guess it’s from both sides.”
Looking at an online photograph of this attractive director, it’s easy to conclude that Bergman has used the equally attractive-looking Yair as his on-screen double. Physically and psychologically they are perfect matches. Despondent and constantly spouting semi-absurd philosophical bon mots, Yair eventually finds salvation in a girl who has tried to commit suicide. Bergman admits that there was such a girl in his own life, although he didn’t sit nude on a window ledge with her as Yair does in the film.
“The girl who cut her wrists was a girlfriend of a mine,” he notes. “She did so because she was afraid she was going to be like her parents. As I said, we weren’t naked on the window, but we did some weird stuff in our time together.”
Not surprisingly, the film that had a greatest influence on Bergman, the one that made him switch from photography to celluloid, was Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” a veritable ode to depression. “It influenced me, not only as a filmmaker but as a person,” he insists. “When I was 16, I was already living on my own, and I saw it an enormous number of times; so many times that when I became a filmmaker, I wanted to touch people in the way that film touched me.” His other influences, he says, are Francois Truffaut, Mike Leigh, Krzysztof Kieslowski and, perhaps not coincidentally, Ingmar Bergman.
But what most shaped this Bergman were his years with the Israeli Defense Forces. He was drafted in 1987. “Go into the army and you’ll understand how my life was changed,” Bergman says. “I was carrying this philosophical way of thinking at the time, that our reality is not the real reality. I was influenced by Carlos Casteneda, his ‘Don Juan,’ and P. D. Ouspensky. They all really say the same thing altogether, that we don’t see reality as it is. But suddenly reality didn’t care how I saw it. It was just there. Reality was agreeing with the whole army so I really had to grow up.”
Stuck with an officer that despised him, Bergman delved further into Casteneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” a book about a Yaqui American Indian who is feared for his extraordinary spiritual powers. Bergman recalls that “Don Juan said that to be a slave is a very good opportunity to grow from the inside, and what you got to do is become a perfect slave. But then do whatever you do with spirit and in an arty way. So I began to do that. I made myself the perfect slave. Everything that I had to do, I did with a free mind. Eventually it worked. My officer got off my back. Two years later, my girlfriend told me that she had actually just gone to speak with him and told him if he’s not off my back, she’s going tell his wife about the affair that they had had. So that’s a story about my reality of growing up in the army.”
It’s the one personal story that did not find its way into “Broken Wings.” But perhaps this experience and its consequences for Bergman’s life will make it into another film.
This past Friday one of Israel’s most internationally acclaimed films, “Broken Wings” (“Knafayim Shvurot”), landed in Manhattan. The winner of nine Israeli Film Academy Awards, three more from the Berlin International Film Festival, plus the Tokyo Grand Prix, this family drama is now set to garner rave reviews stateside, and a few are already in.
J. Hoberman in The Village Voice insists this movie is “eloquent %u2026 and an auspicious debut.” The Onion’s Scott Tobias adds that this import bears “the mark of a great writer [in that] every character, minor or major, seems distinct and fully inhabited, to the point where it’s easy to imagine them existing before the action starts, after it ends, and apart from any plot machinations at all.”
Haifa-born director/writer Nir Bergman, 35, is the man responsible for all this celluloid infatuation. The story, inspired in part by his own family history%u2013Bergman’s parents divorced when he was ten%u2013portrays the Ullman family as they attempt to cope with grief. Nine months earlier, the father, who was allergic to bees, was stung and died. For three months following her husband’s death, Dafna, the mother (renowned Israeli stage actress Orli Zilbershatz-Banai), slept on unwashed sheets so she could remain near her dead husband’s scent. As the film opens, she is back to being a midwife on the night shift.
Each of the four Ullman children respond variously to their father’s death. The 17-year-old daughter Maya (Maya Maron), who plays in a rock group, suddenly finds herself cast into the role of parent, often left to tend the two younger, strong-willed siblings, Ido and Bahr. Maya also has a twin, Yair (Nitai Gvirtz), who makes money by handing out flyers while dressed in a mouse outfit, something he’s done ever since dropping out of school. Yair also suffers from depression.
On top of the sense of loss with which they have to cope, the Ullmans also are thrown into dire economic straits as a result of having lost their father, who was the main breadwinner in the family. Just to use the family car, for example, Dafna has to push it to get it going. Needless to say, they cannot afford any luxuries.
What may strike some American viewers as odd is that in the film’s 80 or so minutes, the Israeli/Arab conflict is never mentioned. In a phone interview, Bergman, who is currently in Los Angeles promoting his film, explained, “It has nothing to do with my personal view of the situation. The fact is that I made a film about a family. This doesn’t mean that my thoughts are not on the peace process. You can think of ‘Broken Wings’ as a statement saying something about the value of life and not politics.
“You know,” continued Bergman, who lives in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend and two twin children, “usually when someone dies in an Israeli film, it will be as a consequence of the war. He will be a hero. I’m saying this family, these people coping, are my heroes right now. Just a small family trying to survive a normal day. You have to understand the economic situation right now in Israel. It is so bad that I guess that this is what’s going to bring peace eventually. Why? Because people understand that this impossible economic situation is connected to what’s happening in politics. The word on the street is that people are much more than ready for peace, and I guess it’s from both sides.”
Looking at an online photograph of this attractive director, it’s easy to conclude that Bergman has used the equally attractive-looking Yair as his on-screen double. Physically and psychologically they are perfect matches. Despondent and constantly spouting semi-absurd philosophical bon mots, Yair eventually finds salvation in a girl who has tried to commit suicide. Bergman admits that there was such a girl in his own life, although he didn’t sit nude on a window ledge with her as Yair does in the film.
“The girl who cut her wrists was a girlfriend of a mine,” he notes. “She did so because she was afraid she was going to be like her parents. As I said, we weren’t naked on the window, but we did some weird stuff in our time together.”
Not surprisingly, the film that had a greatest influence on Bergman, the one that made him switch from photography to celluloid, was Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” a veritable ode to depression. “It influenced me, not only as a filmmaker but as a person,” he insists. “When I was 16, I was already living on my own, and I saw it an enormous number of times; so many times that when I became a filmmaker, I wanted to touch people in the way that film touched me.” His other influences, he says, are Francois Truffaut, Mike Leigh, Krzysztof Kieslowski and, perhaps not coincidentally, Ingmar Bergman.
But what most shaped this Bergman were his years with the Israeli Defense Forces. He was drafted in 1987. “Go into the army and you’ll understand how my life was changed,” Bergman says. “I was carrying this philosophical way of thinking at the time, that our reality is not the real reality. I was influenced by Carlos Casteneda, his ‘Don Juan,’ and P. D. Ouspensky. They all really say the same thing altogether, that we don’t see reality as it is. But suddenly reality didn’t care how I saw it. It was just there. Reality was agreeing with the whole army so I really had to grow up.”
Stuck with an officer that despised him, Bergman delved further into Casteneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” a book about a Yaqui American Indian who is feared for his extraordinary spiritual powers. Bergman recalls that “Don Juan said that to be a slave is a very good opportunity to grow from the inside, and what you got to do is become a perfect slave. But then do whatever you do with spirit and in an arty way. So I began to do that. I made myself the perfect slave. Everything that I had to do, I did with a free mind. Eventually it worked. My officer got off my back. Two years later, my girlfriend told me that she had actually just gone to speak with him and told him if he’s not off my back, she’s going tell his wife about the affair that they had had. So that’s a story about my reality of growing up in the army.”
It’s the one personal story that did not find its way into “Broken Wings.” But perhaps this experience and its consequences for Bergman’s life will make it into another film.
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s
Adam Goldberg, Superjew!!
Next week at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (May 3-11), “the baddest Hebe this side of Tel Aviv” will be trying to save Chanukah from a very evil force, the son of Santa.” Yes, us gefilte fish aficionados have finally gotten our very own Orthodox superhero, Mordechai Jefferson Carver, better known as “The Hebrew Hammer.”
This possibly offensive tale was a comic favorite at this year’s Sundance film festival, and is winning new fans daily. “It’s the vanguard of the new Jewish humor,” insists the Director of Programming at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Shlomo Schwartzberg. “Infectiously silly … A good-natured Judaic spin on the ‘70s Blaxploitation genre,” insists Variety’s David Rooney. And don’t forget Britain’s jewish.co.uk web site, which avows this is the “best Jewish comedy of the last ten years.”
So who plays the Kosher detective who saves the dreidel from oblivion? Adam Goldberg, 32, every casting agent’s favorite Jew, and Steven Spielberg’s too. Name doesn’t ring a bell?
How about Private Stanley Mellish in “Saving Private Ryan,” the enlistee who taunted the German soldiers with his heritage. In “A Beautiful Mind,” Goldberg was Richard Sol, John Forbes Nash Jr.’s supportive co-worker at Princeton. Then in the recent Val Kilmer vehicle, “Salton Sea,” he portrayed a druggie trying to make money by stealing Bob Hope’s stool sample.
You might also recall his sidekick roles in the cult favorite “Dazed and Confused” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” voice-over for “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Homeward Bound,” plus a recurring part on “Friends.”
If this isn’t enough, the Independent Film Channel is currently broadcasting a hilarious pseudo-documentary Goldberg has directed, produced and written the original music for, “Running with the Bulls.” This hour-long tale is about a young man named Adam Goldberg who’d like to imitate Ernest Hemingway and run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Three problems arise to deter him from succeeding in this quest, however: he doesn’t have enough money to film in Spain, he’s afraid of transatlantic flights, and crowds and bulls don’t put him at ease, either. His alternative: driving to Chicago and scampering around the Chicago Bulls stadium in a matador costume.
Filled with quotes from Sartre and other philosophers, plus songs with lyrics like “What did you have for dinner last night? I had Thai food. It didn’t sit right,” this is Jean-Luc Godard meets Monty Python, subversive T.V. at its very best.
To find out whether Goldberg in everyday life was more of a modern, David-esque Jewish hero, or a neurotic mess, I phoned him up the other day while he was incognito somewhere in Manhattan, and asked, “So, is the Adam Goldberg we see in ‘Running with the Bulls’ the Adam Goldberg I’m talking to?”
“Yeah, sort of,” the rising star replied. “The idea was that I felt a little bit ambivalent about exposing too much of myself. I decided I would veil this character, by calling him ‘a man named Adam Goldberg,’ because I didn’t actually want to go so far as to have a pseudonym or whatever. ‘Running with Bulls’ is obviously a documentary, but it’s also just another joke on my inability to even veil my identity, really.”
I was going to ask Goldberg to repeat that again for clarity’s sake, but then I was afraid doing so might put him over the edge so I decided to move on to his Jewishness and getting stereotyped as an actor.
“Well, you know,” Goldberg explained, “this is a whole other ball of wax. I probably should have changed my name when I had the chance because I’m half Jewish. My mother was Catholic so if I inherited a philosophical sensibility from anybody, it would probably be from my mother.
“But you’re right,” he continued, “that Jews are stereotyped that way, which is something I’m always struggling with because it’s a such an obvious identity to attach to me, which I suppose I play into. It seems to me that most of my neurotic behavior, I inherited from my Mom’s side of the family.”
And how about his paternal inheritance, his Jewish side?
Laughing, he said, “I suppose it can be argued my allergies and sinus problems were inherited from the Goldbergs.”
Clearing his throat, Goldberg recalled, “You know, I would read a lot about Woody Allen, who would always take issue with the idea that people refer to him as intellectual because, in fact, he felt he had a working-class upbringing. I guess I don’t really consider myself an intellectual either. I consider myself intelligent, and in a town like Hollywood, obviously that might be rare, but I don’t consider myself an intellectual on the level of actual intellectuals.” So much for talking Kant in Tinseltown.
Getting back to his name, and putting aside his adorable Jewish-boy looks, does Adam think those eight letters, G-O-L-D-B-E-R-G, are the reasons he’s stereotyped? I mean, who would cast a Goldberg as a gentile?
“I don’t think I’m totally stereotyped,” Goldberg countered, “but a name certainly can relegate you slightly. But it would be interesting for me to play a Christian. I should play Jesus, to tell you the truth. If you look at Jesus’ bone structure, such as it probably was, I’m sure it’s much more along the lines of mine than it is of a wispy, Aryan guy’s.” With a laugh, he muses, “That would be interesting casting.”
But one reason Goldberg is not taking Paxil or getting electroshock right around now is that he’s slowly turning to directing. In 1998, he directed, wrote and starred in “Scotch and Milk.” The plot, according to the Internet Movie Data Base, went like this: “A brooding self-styled swinger (Goldberg) obsessed with things from the ‘50s loses himself in booze and night-clubbing amongst similar men.” Now he’s editing “I Love Your Work” starring Giovanni Ribisi and “Run Lola Run’s” Franka Potente. In the plot of this psychological drama, a movie star winds up stalking his fan. How’s that for turning the tables? “The film is not incredibly dark,” its director shares. “But it’s darker and much more serious than ‘Running with the Bulls,’ which is a sort of satirical documentary.”
“That’s why I am all right,” Goldberg explained. “If I wanted nothing more than to act, then I would probably be much more concerned with being an actor who is struggling constantly with being stereotyped. But it’s not my primary focus. It doesn’t bother me as much as it might.”
And the stereotyping has also helped. “Definitely, ‘Saving Private Ryan’ changed my career. Well, honestly, I don’t know if it changed my career. Well, maybe it changed my recognizability or my status as a celebrity. Honestly, I don’t know how much it affected my career one way or the other. It just probably gave me a little bit more clout in terms of trying to promote myself.”
But not enough to get the lead in “The Piano.” “My ex-girlfriend told me that she was really upset that I didn’t know about that film,” Goldberg admits. “That I didn’t hear of it until it had been made. Adrian Brody’s certainly a good example of somebody who has managed to fill that kind of ‘70s Pacino/Hoffman shoes. Yeah, certainly, when I started out, it seemed to me that would be an obvious route for me to take.”
Instead, he’s driving a cool Cadillac and wearing leather together with a yarmulke and tallith in “The Hebrew Hammer.” “My character’s like an orthodox Shaft,” Goldberg laughs. “I have little payes. Hipster payes. It did occur to me that this film could be considered sacrilegious, I guess, but honestly, if you can’t see the humor in something like this, then I don’t really care if you’re offended by it. It reminds me of those Mel Brooks movies from the ‘70s or the really early Woody Allen movies like “Sleeper.” ” And according to its production company, ContentFilm, “The Hebrew Hammer” is in the midst of distribution talks so it might actually hit mall screens by the end of the year.”If you’re offended by it,” Goldberg adds, laughing, before he hangs up, “then you’re way too religious to begin with.”
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