A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz’s memoir of his mother’s enlivening imagination, disenchantment and mortal despair is a riveting human drama. But the film’s widest import may relate to its backdrop — the emergence of the new state of Israel from the violence of the last days of the British Mandate through the surrounding Arab nations’ determined attempt to eliminate her.

The two threads share a tragic theme, enunciated toward the end: the inevitable disappointment when a dream is realized. Both for the Oz family and for the Jewish people, having a dream enlivens them and gives them the hope and the spirit to continue in the face of terrible experiences. But when the dream comes true it can prove more complicated than expected, even compromised, possibly lost. 

Amos’s father Arieh is a librarian hoping to become a successful novelist. His first novel promises his dream may come true. The smell of the ink is an idea — publication — made material. But the only copies sold are, secretly, to his friend. 

When the Arabs’ attack drives everyone in the building into the Oz flat-turned-bomb shelter, when mother Fania’s best friend is killed, when daily life shrinks to fear and scrounging, the family suffers the real consequences of the Israeli dream of statehood. The dream that has sustained the suffering Jews for centuries has come painfully true. 

When Fania and her extremely privileged family were forced to flee to Israel, she married Arieh, seduced by his words and confident in his ambition. Her marriage dissipates the romance. Her only surviving ardor is her total love of her son.  

When Arieh comes home in his new National Guard uniform he seems a comic figure, mock heroic. Fania envisions a handsome young man driving a garden stake into the earth, in place of her bespectacled husband. The penetration is personal and political, fertilizing her and the land. He reappears in a flowing tallis amid the desert mountains, enveloping her in a vision both passionate and political. At the end, her ineluctable drive to suicide takes his form as an embracing lover. She kills herself because her romantic dream cannot accommodate her disappointing reality.

Arieh adjusts. When Fania turns him away he falls into a relationship with another woman. He lives the bathetic romantic alternative she heroically imagines. He can’t understand his wife and the forces that compel  her. “She punishes herself only to punish me.” 

He may be the writer but the inspired imagination lies in Fania. Her bedtime stories and life lessons teach Amos to deal with a dangerous reality by telling a story. Fiction sustains the dream even against real enemies, whether the schoolboy thugs who rob and beat him or the Arab nations bent upon another Jewish genocide.

Amos grows up as both parents’ son, their combination. As a child,  he shared his father’s love for fresh ink but initially recoiled from the suggestion he might become a writer. He saw the writer unable to help his wife. He’d prefer to be a firefighter or dog poisoner, a curious polarity of helping and killing. He leaves the family to join a kibbutz but he can’t escape his mother’s legacy, the imagination, the compulsion to tell a story, to sustain a dream. Bronzed like a kibbutznik he remains pale within, the librarian’s son, ever more comfortable riding a typewriter rather than a tractor.

Novelist Oz is a leading voice on the Israeli left. For all her register as his memory of his treasured mother, Fania’s political significance may embody Israel’s need to realize that a dream must be inflected and adjusted if its essential values are to be sustained in an unyielding real world. 

In a tragicomic replay of this theme, both mothers-in-law refuse to accept the marriage. Arieh stolidly sits by when his mother mercilessly snipes at his wife. In the face of Fania’s mother’s more vicious abuse Fania can only shrink, then release her frustrations and anger — by slapping herself. She hastily repairs to the washroom to hide her tears from Arieh and Amos. Some pains lie beyond the imagination to escape. Both older mothers are yiddische mommas — with fangs. Their common legacy is self-punishment.

So too the political resonance of Fania’s moral lessons to young Amos: “If you have to choose between telling a lie or insulting someone, choose to be generous…. It’s better to be sensitive than to be honest.” This coheres with Arieh’s optimism: “You can find hell and also heaven in every room. A little bit of evilness and men to men are hell. A little bit of mercifulness and men to men are heaven.”

That’s the point of the film’s single scene of Arab-Jewish community. “Lent” to a childless Jewish couple, little Amos is taken to an important Arab citizen’s soiree. In the garden he strikes up a conversation with a little Arab girl. They speak each other’s language; there is hope. In his comfort Amos climbs a tree and hangs on the chains of the swing, playing at the Tarzan he has read about and will deploy in his defensive stories.  

A link breaks. The swing falls, injuring the girl’s younger brother. It was an accident, only an accident, but it spreads into an unbridgeable abyss. Amos sees the little girl being severely scolded. For negligence? For befriending the Jew? Any difference between those reasons disappears. Arieh phones to reiterate his apology and regrets, to learn how the little boy is doing, to offer to pay the full costs of the lad’s treatment — but is brusquely rebuffed. 
     The imagination that can overcome gaps between people can also create them. Oz writes for the Israeli side in this historic cycle of hatred and suspicion. He warns against the possible contamination of their dream with evil and their abiding need for mercy. It will take much mercy if the dream of love is to survive the darkness.  
      As writer, director and star, this film is an astonishing triumph for Natalie Portman.