Review: The Song of Names, Though Moving, Is Undone by Politeness

In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.

Song of Names
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Adapted from Norman Lebrecht’s 2002 novel, The Song of Names is the kind of handsome, restrained, and respectful prestige picture that seems to withstand all industry trends and upheavals. Yet as a particular kind of prestige picture, the Holocaust drama, it carries burdens and responsibilities that its politeness often sidesteps.

François Girard’s film begins in London in 1951, where Polish-Jewish violin prodigy Dovidl fails to show up to his own heavily anticipated public debut. Dovidl’s musical tutelage and career have been financed by music publisher Gilbert Simmonds (Stanley Townsend), and the man’s son, Martin (Misha Handley), watches helplessly as his father is forced to cancel the performance and incur major losses that lead to his early death. Martin never sees nor hears from Dovidl again until the present day, when a series of coincidences lead him on a lengthy quest through Europe and America to find the vanished violinist.

Martin’s quest initiates a flashback structure that slowly reveals how and why Dovidl became part of the Simmonds household: During World War II, as the Rapoports remain in Poland on the eve of the Nazi invasion, nine-year-old Dovidl (Luke Doyle), who decides to go by the name David, is given sanctuary and support by the wealthy Simmonds. The family immediately recognizes the child’s preternatural musical abilities, and while the same age as David, Martin is at first leery of this intruder, whose brashness proves grating and whose talent and religion encourage the family to lavish special attention on their charge.

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To their credit, Girard and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine never sanctify David for his suffering: He’s a fully dimensional character whose musical genius inflates his ego to the point of obnoxiousness, but whose typically masked vulnerability is exposed whenever he reacts to the tragic events unfolding in his native country. His friendship with Martin is complex, as Martin envies David but at the same time looks up to him due to the prodigy’s intellectual and emotional sophistication. At moments, the film captures the confused ideas and impulses children form when confronted with real-life horror, and while their performances are slightly stilted, Doyle and Handley possess the necessary preciousness and gravity to convey a wide spectrum of emotions. In the few scenes between David and Martin in their late teenage years and early 20s, actors Jonah Hauer-King and Gerran Howell, respectively, perform just as well.

But The Song of Names too often feels clunky and run-of-the-mill in its artistry. Lensed by cinematographer David Franco with an emphasis on drab, muted colors, the film strives for capital-I importance as a period drama, and, though effectively recreated, ’40s and ’50s London has never looked so characterless as it does here. And the omnipresent orchestral soundtrack by Howard Shore drowns already emotional scenes in aural syrup, and undermines the pin-drop fragility of musical performances meant to express the characters’ feelings.

Elsewhere, the film’s flashback structure wastes Tim Roth as the present-day Martin. Roth is mostly relegated to asking other characters about Dovidl’s post-1951 actions, which could have been depicted rather than merely spoken of in order to convey the full extent of how the fate of his family changes Dovidl’s perspective on music and religion. The film’s reliance on the flashback forces it into other awkward corners: Clive Owen has only a few minutes of screen time as the older Dovidl and barely gets to explore the character’s rich contradictions, while a subplot involving the men’s mutual love interest (Catherine McCormack) remains tacked on and cheaply exploited for melodramatic purposes.

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In the end, Song of Names is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts. While the material is powerful, conveying the tragedy of the Holocaust on both a personal and historical level, Girard and Caine use that tragedy to conflate Judaism almost exclusively with mourning. The film also states that community and creativity have nothing to do with one another, as if art has never been the result of collective endeavor.

Given that so many commercial films about Jews and Judaism concern the Holocaust, it’s unfortunate that in The Song of Names the world’s oldest monotheistic religion is once again reduced to a sort of collective martyrdom, especially when it suggests—when revealing the reason for Dovidl’s disappearance—that to properly honor the Shoah is also to renounce the secular world. More than that, because The Song of Names is structured around Martin’s quest to understand what became of Dovidl, the character’s religious understanding of and response to tragedy is depicted as a plot twist rather than the anguished result of a spiritual journey, something that the filmmakers likely never intended.

Score: 
 Cast: Tim Roth, Clive Owen, Catherine McCormack, Jonah Hauer-King, Gerran Howell, Luke Doyle, Misha Handley, Stanley Townsend, Magdalena Cielecka, Eddie Izzard, Marina Hambro, Amy Sloan, Saul Rubinek, Richard Bremmer, Julian Wadham, Daniel Mutlu  Director: François Girard  Screenwriter: Jeffrey Caine  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 113 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Michael Joshua Rowin

Michael Joshua Rowin is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Queens, New York. His writing has appeared in The Notebook, Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and other publications.

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