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One Plus One Equals Two | Max Von Sydow and Susan Sarandon’s combined acting prowess isn’t enough to make Emotional Arithmetic watchable.

EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC
Directed by Paolo Barzman. Starring Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow. Opens Fri, Apr 25.
2 1/2 Stars

I have an aversion to films about the Holocaust. Does that make me a terrible person?

I don’t think so. Insensitive, maybe? Exactly the opposite, I think. 

The problem facing any film treatment of this period in history, as I see it, is that it has to perform a tricky balancing act: it’s got to tell the story of one person’s terrifying experience (which few of us can really relate to), but it’s also got to drive at a greater, even more horrifying social reality (which neither you nor I will likely really understand). I’m not saying it’s a futile effort, but they have to be judiciously shot, well-written, and downright superbly acted. Trapeze artists who can pull off all three of those stunts are few and far between.

With Emotional Arithmetic, director Paolo Barzman fulfills two of those requirements. He’s got an absolutely loaded cast and his cinematographer is Luc Montpellier (who also shot Sarah Polley’s Away From Her). But as for the script... well, two out of three isn’t enough.

Emotional Arithmetic (based on Matt Cohen’s novel of the same name) tells the story of three friends reunited some 40 years after their internment at Drancy, a Nazi “way-station” outside of Paris for Jews on their way to death camps. Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon) receives a letter from Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), who was her mentor and guardian during the many months in the detention camp, and she invites him to her home in Quebec’s Eastern River region. 

Now middle-aged and living with her much older husband David (Christopher Plummer), Melanie is shocked to find that Jakob has brought Michael (Gabriel Byrne), her childhood friend from the camp, along with him. It doesn’t take Melanie and Michael long to rekindle their first love, and soon the idyllic weekend turns into an outpouring of memories, emotional confusion, and bitterness. 

It’s splendid to watch a cast this talented throw themselves at a subject this deeply affecting. Sarandon inflects her character with the mental and physical frailty of a woman wrangling with an unloving husband and a traumatic past, while Plummer and Von Sydow, despite their advanced age, have such regal screen presences and they fill each of their scenes together with such tension that the screen practically seems ready to jump off the damn wall. 

But they’re done in by Jefferson Lewis’ underwritten, mercilessly dull script, which undermines the potential complexity of these characters at every turn: Byrne is stuck, uncharacteristically, with a weak character; Von Sydow doesn’t get nearly enough to say; and Melanie, who is supposed to be torn between healing and moving forward or remaining shackled to her past, has her complex struggle so dumbed down that it registers more as neurotic craziness.

At one point, Plummer’s character does us the favour of putting the film’s theme into words: how are we allowed to suffer, he asks, if we know that someone else’s pain will always be greater? Now, I’m the kind of viewer who thinks these questions can’t be answered, but come on, Paolo Barzman: at least give me a fighting chance at figuring them out.