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Props to Natalie Portman’s writing and directing debut for being such a smartly handled adaptation of a seminal work about Jewish history and identity. Does her artistic ambition exceed her grasp? Absolutely, but this is no mere vanity project by the star as much as it is a truly invigorating work. You’ll forgive her occasional heavy-hand or awkward transition between reality, memory, or story within a story fable.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is an adaptation of Amos Oz’s autobiography alternating between his childhood in Jerusalem and his parents remembrances of pre-WWII European life, all of it marked either with the promise or fulfillment of violence. Much of the film obsesses over Oz’s relationship with his mother and the stories she told him as a child. These memories often end in blood or some strange stalemate where escape or peace are illusionary dreams.
To counterbalance his mother’s fabulations, there’s Oz’s father with his formal rigidity and structural demands. This eventual becomes a synecdoche of Israel’s creation and the continual controversy and debate about its prominence, creation, and presence on the world stage to this day. Portman manages to treat this section of the material with the respect, integrity, and nuance it deserves.
Yet when her maternal figure must descend and eventually die, an inciting incident so traumatic and formative for Oz that he begins his memories with the word “mother,” A Tale of Love and Darkness becomes maudlin and Portman’s firm grasp on this section loosens. It is here that the stories that she told Oz, ones that clearly formed a lasting impression and formative understanding upon him, begin to go sideways. It reaches an apex of wish fulfillment at odds with the veracity of the material in a sequence where young Oz enters his mother’s stories and performs a succession of rescues of the tragic subjects, all of whom become his mother.
The romantic storytelling between mother-and-son in the first half has twisted into something cheaper here, and something that distracts from the thornier aspects at play as well. It feels too pat for everything that has gone on before and will go on after. Still, as a debut feature film goes, Portman could’ve done much worse and she deserves rousing applause for what she’s managed to accomplish here. I wonder what she’ll do next.
