lute Uhlman

At The Movies

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William H Macy
as Lawrence Newman
and Laura Dern as
Gertrude Hart
in "Focus."

a.

In "Focus,"
David Paymer
plays Finkelstein,
a Jewish victim of
anti-Semitism.

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Anti-Semitism In 'Focus'

Playwright Arthur Miller's only novel comes to the silver screen,
and stars William H. Macy as a Christian mistaken for a Jew.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

D

avid Mamet calls me
Hebraically-challenged,"
confides actor William H.
Macy, a longtime collabo-
rator (I the esteemed Jewish play-
wright. "I'm the ultimate [gentile].
Part of me is the imploding WASP, a
role I've certainly played to death."
With his weak smile and wounded-
looking blue eyes, Macy was riveting
in his Oscar-nominated turn as the car
dealer struggling to cover up his wife's
kidnapping in the Coen brothers'
1996 film, Fargo.
He was the humiliated husband of
an oversexed porn star in Boogie Nights
and a beleaguered 1950s sitcom dad in

Pleasantville.
Which is why he was cautious when
director Neal Slavin asked him to star
in his noirish feature-film debut, Focus
— based on Arthur Miller's 1945
novel about a milquetoast mistakenly
identified as Jewish by his anti-Semitic
neighbors. The film opens today at the
Maple Art Theatre in Bloomfield
Township.
"I told Neal I was all wrong for the
role," says the earnest, 51-year-old
actor. "I said, Anti-Semitism is a-
vicious thing and I don't want to
offend anyone by presuming to know
what it feels like. Plus, I don't even
look Jewish.'

11/9

2001

80

"And Neal very gently said, 'That's
why you're perfect. Intolerance has
nothing to do with reality."'
Just to make sure, Macy described
the problem to Mamet. "What's the
matter with you?" the Jewish writer
retorted. "When Arthur Miller writes
a novel, you jump to bring it to the
screen."
Mamet reminded Macy of how he'd
silenced a journalist who'd asked why
there were no Jewish actors in his

1991 Jewish themed film, Homicide.
"David said, 'Huh, interesting con-
cept, casting by religion,"' the actor
recalls. "That shut her up in a hurry."
Miller wrote Focus to expose the sel-
dom-discussed anti-Semitism prevalent
in New York in the early 1940s.
Macy says he didn't witness anti-
Semitism while growing up outside
Atlanta in the 1950s, though another
kind of prejudice profoundly affected
his life.

`Focus' Review

MICHAEL FOX
Special to the Jewish News

L

t.

awrence Newman is what his neighbors in 1940s
Brooklyn might call a milquetoast. He shares a house
with his mother, carries an umbrella even on sunny
days and has never been heard to utter a forceful opinion.
One ordinary day, at the prodding of his boss, Newman
(William H. Macy) gets a new pair of glasses. He chooses
an apparently innocuous frame, but overnight the world
sees him differently — as a Jew.
Newman denies that he looks Jewish — not that it
should make-any difference if he were, he makes a point of
insisting — but in a time of bubbling anti-Semitism he's
suddenly no longer invisible and anonymous.
Neal Slavin's meticulously well-wrought film adaptation
of Arthur Miller's novel Focus is a hard-hitting moral para-
ble of a complacent man caught up in events not of his

When he was 10, his father, a
medal-winning World War II pilot,
was so shocked b _ y the seething racism
he saw at a PTA meeting, he moved
the family north.
At his new school in Cumberland,
Md., Macy experienced bias when his
classmates jeered at his thick Southern
drawl. He was ostracized for years
until he sang a sexually explicit song at
a high-school talent show and was
-elected class president.

choosing. At its core, the film is a searing study of a man
who discovers the courage to cure his own blindness.
The persistence of prejudice has kept Miller's novel from los-
ing its relevance. But Focus is acutely timely in the current cli-
mate, when any person of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance
is viewed with suspicion on a city bus, let alone an airplane.
Newman's troubles begin in earnest when he's demoted
after years of service, and quits his job in a huff.
However it's not as easy as he thought to find a new job,
since every interviewer perceives him as Jewish.
Although the cars, clothes and war talk set the film in
the '40s, a curiously 1930s view of American anti-Semitism
prevails. Columns of help-wanted ads explicitly state,
"Gentiles Only."
A rabidly anti-Semitic priest named Father Crighton —
an obvious stand-in for the detestable '30s radio rabble-
rouser Father Coughlin of Royal Oak — leads a local rally
that climaxes with Newman bloodied.
Newman isn't even the main target of his neighbors
irrational wrath. Finkelstein (David Paymer), the Jew
who runs the corner store, incurs the enmity of the
xenophobes on the block when his relatives from
Eastern Europe move in with him.

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