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Movie Review: 'A Tale of Love and Darkness'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Natalie Portman has been a screen actress since the age of eleven, when she co-starred with Jean Reno and Gary Oldman in Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional.

And she's been an Oscar player compliments of a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Closer in 2004, then an Academy Award for Best Actress in Black Swan in 2010.

Now she's a moviemaker as well, the writer and director of the literary period piece, A Tale of Love and Darkness, a labor-of-love project she has nursed into existence for her feature-film directorial debut after directing a few short films.

ATOLAD is a biographical coming-of-age drama based on the internationally best-selling memoir by Israeli author Amos Oz.

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

It's the story of Oz's youth, set against the backdrop of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Jewish homeland's early years of 1945-1952. Needless to say, these are turbulent, often-violent years, as they all are for the state of Israel.

The film chronicles the young Oz's (Amir Tessler) relationship with his mother, Fania, played by Portman, and his beginnings as a writer.

But Portman sidesteps the straightforward-narrative approach and gives what is essentially one long flashback, with – especially in the first half -- shorter flashbacks within the umbrella flashback, and fragments of memories as we go along to fill in the backstory.

And because the adopted point-of-view is that of the boy, it is a series of necessarily romanticized recollections, with his mother as the primary focus.

An immigrant from eastern Europe, she was the center of her son's world, a complex, confoundingly manic-depressive woman and loving mother who passed on to her son a lifelong love of storytelling but then died tragically in her 30s.

The film takes on the melancholy tone that more or less defined her, but Portman's feelings for the material and the characters come through loud and clear.

Speaking Hebrew on-screen for the first time, actress Portman is her usual commanding self as the fragile Fania, who is eventually defeated by the mundane realities of her life – marriage, motherhood, and money.

Her troubled marriage to Arieh (Gilad Kahana), who does not turn out to be a soulmate, gets plenty of attention, but what stays with us is the coming of age not only of the boy growing up in Jerusalem in the years before statehood but of the eventual state as well.

As we watch, we wonder whether the creation of the state of Israel could – and, more urgently, should – have been more in the foreground than the background here. That is, would we care more about that issue than this individual woman's problems?

That said, Portman seems to go out of her way to avoid this being a vanity project, and she succeeds in giving a lead performance that is anything but glamorous and empathetically endearing.

But our emotional investment comes up a bit short of the mark: perhaps Portman is a bit too reverent about the source material.

For director Portman, this is nonetheless a handsome and assured debut, as she tackles the imposing problem of turning a long book into a short movie.

And to further inflate the level of difficulty, she must treat the still-controversial issue of Israel-Palestine conflict while largely avoiding political statements, and she addresses the turbulence of independent Israel's early years as well as the effect of the Holocaust on young Fania in the Old World.

There is, in other words, lots on her plate. But her emotional connection to, and artistic vision about, just about everything in the movie remains admirably evident.

So we'll recall 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for the passion-project biopic, A Tale of Love and Darkness, a lovingly dark drama about the land of milk and honey that launches Natalie Portman's second career.

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