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Rod Steiger is superb in Lumet's drama of grief, The Pawnbroker |
It’s probably not a spoiler to say that all of this does not
end well. The Pawnbroker is almost unrelentingly grim and bleak. Shot in
a harsh black-and-white – superbly lensed by Boris Kaufman – it mixes French
New Wave realism with a punishingly cold New York aesthetic that catches every
grain of dirt on the streets. The past is virtually a character in the film,
the events of over twenty years ago having far more importance than many of the
trivial events Sol encounters in the present.
The constant presence of the Holocaust, and the scars it has
left, are kept in our mind by the film’s constant use of quick – almost
subliminal – cuts from current day events to snippets of Sol’s past. Hands
pressed against windows turn briefly into hands against barbed wire. A young
lady flicks back and forth into Sol’s wife. The sounds of a train inevitably
transform into a transport train. Lumet makes it clear to us that everything
Sol sees and encounters in the modern world, no matter how small, is just a
continual reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust that defined his life.
This isn’t something as ‘simple’ as survivor’s guilt. It’s
clear that, while his body survived, Sol effectively died in the camps and what
we are seeing is his walking corpse. He’s deliberately alienated himself from
the world and his concern, with no real desire to live but also no will for
self-destruction. Perhaps he sees his continued existence as a punishment for failing
to save his family. This has developed into a loathing for the melting pot of Harlem,
a stubborn, conscious refusal to feel any empathy for anyone living there.
Instead, he works hard to loath them as much as he loathes himself. Trapped by
guilt and grief, Sol slaps away any offers of friendship, pity or warmth.
The film’s greatest strength is Rod Steiger’s towering
performance. Normally Steiger was an actor who never shied away from the
possibility of over-playing. Here, he’s so buttoned down and spiritually dead,
every single movement like he’s walking around in a physical and spiritual
straitjacket. Sol scuttles around the cages of his pawnshop, like a guy who has
never left the camps. His performance is a masterclass in precision, of
carefully restrained movement, gruff speech and eyes that stare into a dread a
thousand miles away. Every step Steiger takes is weighted down by an impossible burden of grief, anger, despair and self-loathing.
It also avoids completely easy sentiment. For all that we
see the suffering slowly revealed of Sol’s past, Steiger isn’t afraid to show
Sol as a difficult, arrogant, even unpleasant character. The defence mechanism
of hostility and non-engagement of the world has only increased his prickly aggressiveness.
But yet, he remains sympathetic as Steiger also conveys the deep pain Sol
spends every single minute of his life suppressing and controlling to stop it
overwhelming him.
If there is a fault with the film, it’s that it goes about
its carefully bleak and hopeless journey through a few days in Sol’s life with
slightly too much precision. The Pawnbroker sometimes mistakes grim,
hard-hitting and misery for emotional investment. For all that the film is a
difficult, searing watch – and the terrors of the flashbacks are ghastly – it’s
somehow not quite as moving as it should be. Perhaps this is because the
present-day plot never quite takes off and the other characters – with the
exception of Peter’s chillingly ebullient but dangerously violent Rodriguez –
don’t quite connect. Fitzgerald’s social worker Marilyn is a character we don’t
quite get to know. Not quite enough time is spent with Sol’s in-laws (despite
good performances from Marketa Kimbrell and Lumet’s father Baruch Lumet) for
their story arc to move us in its own right.
Similarly, the Holocaust sequences – brief and interspersed
as they are – sometimes overplay their hand, particularly the rather
heavy-handed opening sequences showing the Nazerman family playing in the field
minutes before the Germans arrive (accompanied by a thudding musical score –
and Quincy Jones’ score sometimes tries to do much work for the viewer). It
would be hard not to make The Pawnbroker at least a little bit moving,
but Lumet’s film bludgeons us with misery so heavily, that there is no sense of
the lightness or warmth of life that has been lost. Scenes of the Holocaust of
course are hard to watch, but The Pawnbroker bashes us with them to make
us feel things. It's a film that's tough and leaves you in no doubt of the horror, but doesn't always make you feel for individual. You need a touch of what was lost to be truly moved: with
no real sense of that, we can’t grieve with the characters.
But, The Pawnbroker is still a daring film that
leaves a lasting impression. Lumet’s direction has a New Wave freshness and an
immersive sense of the New York Streets. Steiger is fantastic in the lead role
– his most restrained (and greatest) performance ever. The film broke new
ground for sexuality – including making Rodriguez a non-camp, intimidating
homosexual – and while the final beats of inevitable tragedy aren’t quite
earned by the events we see, it’s still a grim and powerful look at the lasting
damage the past causes the present and the crushing legacy of grief.
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