Edek (Stephen Fry) is a Holocaust survivor from Łódź who emigrated to America with his late wife after surviving the unfathomable horrors of Auschwitz. He’s boisterous, horny, and impossible to embarrass — the kind of guy who will happily sing karaoke in a crowded hotel bar and then flirt with half of the women in the audience for an encore. His daughter Ruth (Lena Dunham) is a 36-year-old music journalist from New York City whose greatest hardship in life was landing an interview with the Rolling Stones. She’s morose, severe, and shut off from the world in a way that doesn’t seem to be a symptom of her recent divorce so much as its potential root cause.
As we follow these characters throughout their fraught but funny daddy-daughter trip back to Poland, it will become clear that Edek’s brio stems from the same thing as Ruth’s discontent: A complete severance from their personal history. For Edek, who’s determined to make this solemn homecoming more of a jolly vacation, that severance has been a deliberate act of self-preservation. For Ruth, whose father has never been all that forthcoming about his trauma, that severance has been something of an unsolicited birthright.
Over the course of Julia von Heinz’s wounded but funny “Treasure” (which so closely mirrors the plot and seriocomic tone of Jesse Eisenberg’s sharper “A Real Pain” that it positions the two films in a very strange “Armageddon”/“Deep Impact” situation), these mismatched characters will be forced to reckon with the past in a way that redefines how they relate to each other in the present.
Adapted from Lily Brett’s autobiographical 1999 novel “Too Many Men,” “Treasure” is essentially an intergenerational story about the walls that people build in order to protect themselves and each other. More specifically, it’s a story about what happens when those walls grow so tall they threaten to block out our loved ones on the other side, and the difficult process that’s required to dismantle them before it’s too late. Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.
The trip was definitely her idea. “Treasure” is set in the post-Soviet winter of 1991, when the fall of Communism inspired large numbers of Polish Jews from around the world to visit their homeland for the first time since the war — or ever. In 1939, there were more than three million Jews in the country; when Ruth and Edek arrive in the Warsaw airport some 52 years later, there are fewer than 4,000, and Ruth can’t even find the one she brought along with her (“Never disappear again” she says to her dad after he wanders off in the airport, a telling introduction that will echo throughout the rest of the movie).
Ruth has a detailed plan of what she’d like to see and do over the next few days, while Edek has a general agenda of messing with that plan as much as possible (“what Jew goes to Poland as a tourist?,” he wonders). The friction between those strategies is clear before father and daughter even get to their hotel, as Ruth — a penny-pincher who insists they rely on public transportation — is blithely oblivious to why the sound of a train’s squelching brakes might trigger her father to splurge on a taxi instead (an awkward close-up on Fry’s wincing face ensures that viewers are up to speed on what this movie is doing long before the Holocaust is mentioned by name).
Of course, if Ruth fails to appreciate how difficult it must be for her dad to return to a place that’s haunted by so many of his ghosts (it’s suggested that her parents were the only members of their families to survive the camps), that’s largely because Edek — who never taught his daughter to speak Polish, forcing Ruth’s short-circuiting brain to introduce herself with a “me llamo” at one point — has failed to explain that to her, or to share even the most basic details about his life before the Shoah. Even now, within touching distance of that terrible history, he would rather talk to Ruth about more comfortable subjects like her sex life and why things didn’t work out with her ex-husband Garth, who Edek still loves like a son, and to whom he wants to send a postcard from Auschwitz. Ruth, meanwhile, can’t wrap her head around why they even sell those. “It’s not a museum, it’s a death camp!,” she chides, as if her dad were unaware (it’s hard to think of another line that so perfectly articulates how Dunham’s millennial consternation maps onto the boomer anxiety she wallows in here).
Desperate to make sense of the stump where her family tree should be, and frustrated that her dad would rather flirt with Miss Poland contestants than explain it to her, Ruth spends much of her time at the hotel reading Nazi literature and — in a cry for help that demands a lot more attention than “Treasure” sees fit to give it — using a stick-and-poke to tattoo numbers onto the underside of her forearm. Their various forays into the city prove similarly fruitless, as Edek sweet-talks and/or tips most of the locals they meet into joining his cause. He’s a hard man to resist, and Fry wields the character’s rumpled bigness like a fatal charm offensive, until even his comically exaggerated accent feels like something Edek may have used as a tool to soften the xenophobia he encountered as an immigrant in America.
His most important ally in the effort to dick around and do nothing is Stefan, the cab driver who Edek keeps on retainer throughout the movie. A sweet and smiling man played by “Three Colors: White” star Zbigniew Zamachowski, Stefan is the closest this two-hander gets to having a third wheel, and the only major character who this movie allows to maintain any unexplored interiority. As Edek relents to Ruth’s demands and begrudgingly agrees to visit Łódź, and even pay a visit to the building where he grew up, Stefan begins to seem like a benevolent ferryman who’s bringing his fares back and forth across the river Styx.
His character helps to personify the workaday relationship between life and death in a country where people still live in the homes they “inherited” from evicted Jewish families during the war, and even continue to use the silverware those families had to leave behind. Indeed, several of the thorniest and most effective scenes in this movie find Ruth bartering for heirlooms with the current occupant of Edek’s childhood apartment, a poor man who’s petrified that she’s come to reclaim the deed from him.
“Do not take our home from us,” he begs, leaving Ruth to untangle an impossible knot of pity and indignation that makes her feel like even more of a tourist in her ancestral homeland. That’s followed by a very “Girls”-coded scene where she gets frazzled and wildly overpays for some kitchenware from an unhoused stranger. Are these her people, or are they why she doesn’t seem to have one? It’s hard to say in a country that’s changed too much for Edek to even know where he is most of the time, even if certain details — such as the exact layout of the barracks where he slept in Auschwitz — are forever burned into his brain (that we’re able to see the difference with our own eyes is a credit to Marcel Slawinski and Katarzyna Sobanska’s production design, which complements the tender softness of Daniela Knapp’s cinematography in order to render the film’s Polish locations and German stand-ins as wistful husks of memory).
The subplot involving his old apartment stands out from an episodic story that fails to generate much in the way of dramatic momentum, and seldom bothers to try. “Treasure” might build to an ultra-concise climax that expresses all of its suppressed feelings with a few writerly sobs, but that climactic scene only feels like a concession because the rest of von Heinz’s film is so careful to respect the start-and-stop cadence of intergenerational communication. The way that Edek always hypes Ruth up as a “famous” reporter. The midnight heart-to-heart about how no one cried at her mother’s funeral. The two steps forward one step back kind of understanding that Ruth takes from seeing Edek in a delicate situation when a fire alarm goes off at their hotel one night.
Von Heinz does a fine job of balancing the solemnity of the Holocaust against the (very Jewish) humor of family bonding, but “Treasure” avoids the sentimental glibness of “Life Is Beautiful” only to embrace the madcap catharsis of “Little Miss Sunshine.” The story’s greatest breakthrough is ultimately expressed through an act of cartoon thievery that feels like a miracle cure for the problem this movie spends almost two hours trying to diagnose.
What should feel like a happy compromise between Ruth’s historical curiosity and Edek’s desire to protect her from it only makes the mutual understanding these characters achieve feel as if it’s been forced from the start. We don’t need to see the wall between Ruth and Edek crumble into dust in order to appreciate the work they’re doing to chip away at it, or to recognize how sharing the weight of our stories with each other — unspeakably sad as they might be — is the only way we’ll ever find the strength to carry our heaviest memories into the future.
Grade: B-
Bleecker Street will release “Treasure” in theaters on Friday, June 14.
