Mr. Kaplan

The film’s emotional range reflects in its score. The music ranges from the yiddish classic Oiffen Pripitschik (featured in Schindler’s List) to the epic strains of the Italian Western (for the beach showdown). In between comes a chirpy little pop song celebrating the ex-Nazis’ joy at living happily ever after in Uruguay. That summarizes the film’s mix of sentiment, (mock) heroism, and Holocaust humour. There’s the same layering in the language: yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish.

The main themes develop out of three key speeches. The first is Jacob Kaplan’s assurance that swimming is instinctive. You don’t have to learn it. When you need it your survival instinct will make you swim. In the first scene Kaplan tries to prove that theory, after his friends laughed it off. A seating error left the Kaplans jammed into another table, shrunken by low seats, so the aging man felt additional need to refute his friends’ ridicule. The first shot is of his bare feet walking down the board. He loses his confidence and ends up clinging to it as an unprepared mortal clings to his fading life. He falls into the ppol, is rescued by his wife and is further diminished when he smashes into a friend’s car.

Kaplan takes a figurative dive into the deep end when he trails a man he thinks is an ex-Nazi in hiding. This isn’t Kaplan’s instinct so much as his wishful projection based on news stories and his admiration for Simon Wiesenthal. He adopts the latter’s principle: the Nazis must by brought to justice in respect for the victims. This dive is reversed and literalized when Kaplan dives into the sea to untie the drowning Reich. Reich proved to be a guilt-riddled Kapo — a Jewish tool for the Nazis at Auschwitz — not Kaplan’s Nazi. One of the film’s central themes is thus survival and the instincts it releases. As Kaplan failed to swim on instinct he respects Reich’s defence, that he instinctively turned Kapo to save himself.

Kaplan’s second driving force is his bar mitzvah memory of being expected to live a significant life. He hasn’t, which further prompts the disintegrating geezer to turn Nazi hunter. This need is shared by his driver, the loser Wilson. Though Kaplan fails in his Nazi mission he has the collateral benefit of saving Wilson, increasing his self-respect and his valuing of his family, and paying him well for his services. Wilson gets a new life from Kaplan’s mission. Kaplan gets a new appreciation of his reality. After his colossal blunder with Reich (a good name for a plausible Nazi) Kaplan can accept and laugh away his smaller errors, like ringing the wrong doorbell to get home. As the first shot was of Kaplan’s naked pale old feet, tentative in danger, the last is of his sunburned face, laughing at the absurdity of his age and finally prepared to acknowledge it. Kaplan has grown into an existentialist — which he wasn’t when saw Reich reading Camus’ The Plague not Mein Kampf. But then the ex-cop Wilson misread the real clue: Reich’s long sleeves hiding his Auschwitz tattoo. 

Wilson’s name is curious. Evoking Tom Hanks’ partner in Castaway emphasizes Kaplan’s being isolated by his dwindling faculties. Another Mr Kaplan is the phantom CIA spy in North by Norrthwest. It also recalls Woodrow Wilson, another frustrated idealist, who founded the League of Nations which — inter alia — formalized the world’s commitment to establishing the Jewish state of Palestine (which by the way was to include Judea, Sumeria, Jerusalem and what’s now Jordan. Talk about shrinking faculties). Wilson has the the third key speech: advising Kaplan to face reality. His skepticism about Kaplan’s theories were as accidentally right as Kaplan’s assumption of Reich’s guilt. Both men’s instincts were wrong even if the upshot proved right. Both grow to accept themselves, eschewing heroic ambitions or posturing and contenting themselves with the reality of small loves, centered on their family and its mundane joys. 

     It takes courage to make a sentimental comedy about the Holocaust. This is far superior to the sentimental nonsense of Benigni’s Life is Beautiful. The old man is not ridiculous for wanting to bring Nazi criminals to justice. He was too confident in his wishful instinct. But he’s right to forgive Reich, by diving in helpless to save him. For his part Reich forgives his abductors when he revives Wilson. The film does further service by finding a fresh way to keep the historical shame of the Holocaust alive in an age when there are concerted efforts to erase it. And worse: to repeat it.