THE TROUBLES OF DANIEL
Howe, Irving
There is a political sensibility—it can be found in the pages of The Nation, though elsewhere too— that might roughly be called "the troubles and confusions of the children of Stalinism."...
...They are depicted as innocent zealots who couldn't tell an atomic diagram from a baseball scorecard—which would be all right if everyone seeing the film didn't know that "the Isaacsons" really are the Rosenbergs...
...The Rosenberg defense attorney was not the apolitical Jewish gentleman shown here...
...implication but also a measure of moral complexity...
...but a veteran crusader for left-wing causes who may well have undermined the Rosenbergs' case in order to protect the Communist Party...
...This is the film's best moment, but it will probably be meaningless to many people because Lumet races through it, not troubling to place it in an illuminating context...
...MUCH OF DANIEL, HOWEVER, is disingenuous...
...It maintains a pretense of agnosticism, but the decisive emotional weight is directed toward pressing us into partisanship for "the Isaacsons," and since the fictional disguise is so thin, for the reallife Rosenbergs...
...You are whipped into unearned emotions in behalf of Julius and Ethel just as you are whipped in behalf of Don Corleone —a shade less, perhaps, since no actor in Daniel is as powerful as Marlon Brando in The Godfather...
...This is a welcome change from the disingenuousness of earlier "progressive culture...
...It must resort, consciously or not, to the subterfuge of claiming to say one thing while actually stressing another, with a characteristic outcome of "trouble and confusion...
...A film that hugs the skirts of history and works hard to exploit historical memories has an obligation to be minimally faithful to historical reality...
...A graduate student, Daniel is trying to escape from politics entirely so as to rid himself of childhood memories such as the terrifying moment when he saw FBI agents stomp through his parents' apartment and take away his father...
...Daniel is a bad movie with a few good moments, and I must confess that both the badness and the goodness of it moved me, not in the way an achieved work of art can—toward insight and resolution—but in the way one can be moved by a visit to the scene of early years, old disasters...
...It is this political sensibility, I believe, that informs the film Daniel—whether through direct transmission or cultural osmosis hardly matters...
...The jumpy camera doesn't rest long enough for anything about communism in the 121 Jewish immigrant milieu to become clear, let alone sink in...
...Since Dissent has a policy of not reviewing books by its editors, there won't be a review in its pages...
...Now, in Daniel there are significant departures from the actual course of the Rosenberg case—not nearly enough to establish the film as an autonomous fiction free of the constraints of history, but decidedly enough to tilt the film toward the undeclared judgment that the Rosenbergs were innocent.* At no time does the film venture a clear or explicit statement: they were, they were not guilty...
...But emotionally they find it hard to keep this complex balance, for they are still the children of their parents...
...He then starts to perform a bizarre sort of "hasidic" dance to the strains of the Red Army Song, and for one unnerving moment his clumsy shuffle captures something of the ecstacy of fanaticism...
...At the least, then, the makers of Daniel have had the courage to recognize that an important part of the Communist experience, especially in large cities like New York, had a Jewish coloration...
...But, alas, the political sensibility behind Daniel doesn't lend itself to any coherent point of view...
...Their children are shown as suffering victims, which no doubt the Rosenberg children were...
...Their visceral anger is often justified, but with it can follow a relapse into political stances that isn't...
...When Lumet tries to deal with a serious matter, such as the Communist experience in New York, the result is rather like what you'd expect if Telly Savalas played Lear...
...Still better might have been a touch of realism, say a shot in which a hard-bitten CP leader (V...
...The plot of the film is based on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though in publicity material the director, Sidney Lumet, and the scriptwriter, E. L. Doctorow (from whose novel The Book of Daniel much of the story has been drawn), somewhat coyly deny the obvious dependence of the film on the Rosenberg case...
...Tell these people that it's possible to hold both judgments simultaneously—the Communist movement was corrupt and authoritarian, the Jewish immigrants drawn to it were often good people— and they will surely agree...
...J. Jerome...
...There are a few good moments...
...And even though they know these parents were caught up with an evil movement, they still want to honor the integrity, or at least the motives, of their parents...
...122 the truth—that Julius was guilty, that the case against Ethel was weak, and that the trial and execution were outrageous**—then the film could not only have had a lucid pattern of narrative and ** This view has been developed with great care in a new book by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File (Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...They were our enemies, yet the truth is that in some deep way they were also very much part of the world in which the handful of Jewish anti-Stalinists lived—for they too were immigrants or the children of immigrants, they too prided themselves on having a "historical vision," they too quoted from Marx...
...Children literally, children figuratively . The writers who cultivate this sensibility are not Communists...
...Finally, in its treatment of "the Isaacsons" Daniel is not so different from The Godfather in its treatment of the mafia...
...Oh my God—the pitiful delusion, the delusionary innocence of it all...
...These are intelligent and decent people...
...In one scene at a Communist summer camp, a WASP leader, perhaps meant to suggest Earl Browder, strongly defends the Hitler-Stalin pact and the assembled Jewish comrades rush up to thank him for his illumination...
...Our directors work out of an unbreakable conviction that to allow their characters a few minutes of serious conversation, such as human beings do sometimes conduct, would drive their audiences out of the theaters...
...Had Daniel been conceived with the single- or simple-minded courage of fanaticism, insisting that the Rosenbergs were simply innocent victims of the Cold War, it could at least have had a lucid pattern of narrative and implication...
...But they are not anti-Communists either, and when they hear a speech by Ronald Reagan or read an article in Commentary, they respond to its crudeness with a visceral anger, as if still back in their youth during the McCarthy years, when their parents— literal, figurative—were having a bad time...
...But then their minds drift back to their fathers and mothers, those garment workers and dentists in Brooklyn and the Bronx who worked selflessly for or with "the party...
...The whole movie has a jazzedup, high-powered aura: jerkiness of rhythm, sharp cutting, rapid brutal shots, heavy lighting—technical bravura in behalf of intellectual incoherence...
...Such bits brought back to me memories of those pure-hearted, deluded, nice, and vicious garment workers and dentists who had yielded their souls to the Soviet myth...
...But while eliciting sympathy for the children is an act of humaneness, eliciting it for them in order to prod us into solidarity with the parents is an act of deceit...
...SOME OF DANIEL'S TROUBLES are characteristic of American movies...
...Had the film been made with the courage of what I think is probably * A few of these changes were noted by David Denby in a review in New York magazine: Julius Rosenberg was not a radio repairman [as he is made out to be in the film] but an engineer who had worked on military contracts for the Army Signal Corps...
...says the Rosenbergs were "heroes" for going to their deaths without betraying their connection to "the party...
...They would not deny that the Soviet Union is a dismal tyranny and the Communist movement its dismal agent...
...Scenes portraying the ordeals of the "Isaacson" children are strong, in the way a blow to the face can be strong...
...But Lumet's style is that of socko city cynicism, in its own way quite as manipulative and cheapening as the rural idyllicism Hollywood favored a few decades ago...
...To be sure, writers and directors have the right to invent characters and incidents, but if they claim, or imply, that they are rendering an important historical event, then their legitimate bounds of invention are severely circumscribed...
...q 123...
...The film, on the face of it, is centered on Daniel, son of "the Isaacsons" (the Rosenbergs thinly disguised...
...The film shuttles back and forth between shots of the children struggling to understand their parents' ordeal and shots of their parents head-deep in Communist politics...
...Which doesn't keep me from saying that anyone at all interested in the case ought to look into The Rosenberg File...
...As a result, nothing in Daniel is provided with sufficient detail or progression...
...Given their choice of subject, how could it not...
...There's another scene in which "Isaacson"— played with manic excess by Mandy Patinkinreturns from the army during the Second World War...
...Lumet is a director with a certain order of talent, a lurid craftiness in tensing and pacing that serves well enough for ordinary melodrama but is quite inadequate for a film that, if it's to say anything at all, must aspire to say something complex...
...Persistently the makers of the film have claimed to be concerned mainly with the problems of Daniel and his distressed sister, but I think any responsive viewer must recognize that what really grips the emotions of director and scriptwriter is the fate of their parents...
...He is an NCO eager for "the second front" and pleased to be displaying, before a roomful of comrades, some evidence of manliness...
...They have passed through a time of disillusion or were lucky enough to have escaped it...
...The person who informed on him was not the seemingly fatuous old family dentist of Daniel but Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, a machinist who had worked at Los Alamos in 194445, during the building of the atom bomb, and who confessed to stealing secrets and passing them to Julius...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
