MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Alan & Naomi’: The Trauma of War and Holocaust Through a Child’s Eyes

The preciousness and fragility of life, healing after war, the destructiveness of bigotry. . . . These are the themes of “Alan & Naomi” (selected theaters), a film with fine intentions, not always purely realized.

Based on a 1978 novel by Myron Levoy and set in 1944 Brooklyn, it’s about a young French girl, Naomi, who’s been driven to near catatonia by the death of her Resistance fighter father. We watch Naomi--and WWII and the Holocaust--through the eyes of her playmate Alan, a young Jewish boy, pressed by his parents to help pull her out of darkness.

Alan, played by Lukas Haas, is a reluctant Samaritan. He’d rather be playing stickball in the streets and, initially, he regards his therapeutic visits as shameful. But as Naomi (Vanessa Zaoui) emerges from her mental prison--the traumas that keep her huddled on her bed, tearing up strips of paper--Alan changes; he sees, finally, the connections between anti-Semitic taunts on the streets, and the horror that enveloped his broken little friend.

“Alan & Naomi” is a praiseworthy film, decent, sincere, compassionate, well-crafted. But it lacks something, a certain vital spark.

Director Sterling Van Wagenen, making his feature debut here, is a major figure in the founding of Sundance Institute and the United States Film Festival, and the producer of independent gems such as “A Trip to Bountiful.” But a wonderful producer isn’t necessarily a great director, and the assemblage of this project--writing, casting, production--is more impressive than its execution.

The Brooklyn settings, re-created in Wilmington, N.C., are exquisitely realized. But should they be exquisite? The acting is careful, meticulous, well-thought out. But should it be so meticulous? There’s a tone in some socially conscious films on lower-middle-class subjects that suggests an upper-class filter: poverty in amber, hard times in a glowing glass ball--and much of “Alan & Naomi” falls prey to that tendency.

“Alan & Naomi” has a rich dramatic subject: trying to communicate with the seemingly incommunicable. Yet, if you compare it with two great, similarly-themed films--Arthur Penn’s messy, violent “The Miracle Worker” and Orlow Suenke’s Dutch masterpiece “A Taste of Water”--which plunged us into the tactile awfulness of isolation, you can see the perils of good taste. These two films, by not evading horror, pulled us up to something sublime.

“Alan & Naomi,” by contrast, looks more genteel and pristine: a pretty young girl with angelically tousled hair sits on a bed while a handsome boy cajoles and plays with her, using his dummy to speak to her doll--her mother and hostess, awash in sunlight, cheering him on. The rooms are clean, the lives orderly, the parents charmingly eccentric and humorous. Even the movie’s main bully has a heart, while the abyss of Naomi’s misery is indicated by smearing her face with cellar soot.

There’s something evasive about all this. And though the last freeze-frame of “Alan & Naomi” is a beautiful image, its mood is dissipated by those evasions. “Alan & Naomi” has an excellent cast--the two juvenile leads, plus Michael Gross and Amy Aquino as Alan’s parents and Zohra Lampert as Naomi’s protector--but the one actor that impressed the most was Kevin Connolly as Alan’s Irish-American buddy Shaun. Almost alone in the ensemble, Connolly seems to live his part, rather than unfold its meanings.

The “problems” of “Alan & Naomi” (MPAA rated PG) probably won’t bother anyone predisposed to enjoy it. And they don’t mean the film won’t affect and move--perhaps deeply--its intended audience. But, perhaps they point up what can happen in a climate where movies like this are rare, rather than commonplace, where filmmakers have to sweat simply to get them made, rather than sweating to make them beautifully or powerfully. As they should.