{"id":8039,"date":"2014-10-03T00:09:20","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T07:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=8039"},"modified":"2014-10-01T21:33:06","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T04:33:06","slug":"israel-horovitz-calls-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/10\/03\/israel-horovitz-calls-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Horovitz calls \u201caction!\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Kline and Maggie Smith in Israel Horovitz\u2019s My Old Lady<\/em>. (photo from Cohen Media Group)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Arobust 75, the award-winning playwright, theatre director and screenwriter Israel Horovitz isn\u2019t in the market for a new career. Too bad, for his moving debut as a filmmaker, My Old Lady<\/em>, is a rewarding, beautifully acted story of adults overcoming loneliness and bitterness.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The late, great Jewish director] Sidney Lumet once said to me about directing, \u2018Get the best actors you can on the face of the earth and then get out of their way,\u2019\u201d Horovitz said. \u201cAnd that was, in a sense, a directing style for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adapted by Horovitz from his stage play, My Old Lady<\/em> begins with a rather unlikable New York Jew named Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline) primed to claim the Paris apartment left him by his perpetually despised and recently deceased father. Mathias thinks his luck has finally turned, and that he\u2019s landed on Easy Street after a lifelong stretch of failed marriages and unpublished novels.<\/p>\n

Alas, the apartment is a viager, which means the elderly Englishwoman (Maggie Smith) residing there with her unmarried daughter (the always-great Kristin Scott Thomas) retains tenancy until her death. Mathias\u2019 actual inheritance, in the meantime, is the monthly payment contractually owed to the old lady. You don\u2019t need to imagine his frustration and anger, for Mathias makes no effort to hide it.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
On set with director Israel Horovitz (yellow jacket). (photo from Cohen Media Group)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My Old Lady<\/em>, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month and is in wide release this month, spills many poignant secrets that expose the characters\u2019 long-concealed connection, and the scars from the past that they still bear. It makes for powerful drama, even though Horovitz excised a chunk of the original play dealing with the treatment of Jews during the Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found that I had to boil the whole thing down into a kind of \u2018guy walks into a bar\u2019 story,\u201d Horovitz said, \u201cthen write a film as though I had never written [the] stage play. In the first draft of the film, which was enormously too long, all of the talk about the Nazi occupation of Paris was in. As I boiled it down to what I thought the real theme of the film was, the real spine, it wasn\u2019t that. It was about Mathias, his relationship with his father, and his ultimate forgiveness of his father. [Mathias] doesn\u2019t renounce being Jewish, he doesn\u2019t hide being Jewish. It\u2019s just not what the movie\u2019s about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horovitz is the author of more than 70 produced plays, including such Jewish-themed works as Park Your Car in Harvard Yard <\/em>and Lebensraum<\/em>. He also penned the screenplay for Sunshine, Istv\u00e1n Szab\u00f3\u2019s epic 1999 film about a Hungarian Jewish family spanning the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing Jewish is part of my life, but it\u2019s not my only subject,\u201d Horovitz said.<\/p>\n

The writer has garnered several shelves\u2019 worth of awards, including two Obies, France\u2019s Commandeur de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a lifetime achievement award from B\u2019nai B\u2019rith. The writer is as famous and respected in France as he is in the United States, which allows him a unique perspective on the increase in French antisemitism.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have some Jewish friends [in Paris], some of them in high places, who are grievously alarmed, and some Jewish friends who are kind of in denial,\u201d Horovitz said. \u201cAnd then I have me, in my own skin, and when I\u2019m in Paris I\u2019m, quite frankly, a very highly regarded playwright, so I may not get the same kind of experience or the same kind of antisemitism [as] some French Jew going to synagogue in a [small] town. You couldn\u2019t have a more Jewish name than mine unless your name was Israel Jew, so there\u2019s no question in anybody\u2019s mind when they meet me that I\u2019m Jewish. Do I personally experience a lot of antisemitism? Almost none; almost none that I see.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Horovitz can\u2019t say the same about growing up in Wakefield, Mass., a town about 12 miles north of Boston, in the 1940s and \u201950s.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid I as a kid experience antisemitism? On a daily basis. The overriding sentiment in my town was, \u2018Why did we go to war and lose all of these American boys? We just should have given Hitler his Jews.\u2019 Now that wasn\u2019t everybody, but it was some people, and they were quite vocal about it. I can\u2019t, in my wildest imagination, think that all of France or all of Paris is antisemitic, but the people who go out in the street with their fists in the air and do Hitler salutes are certainly visible.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his next film project, Horovitz is working on a screenplay based on Park Your Car in Harvard Yard<\/em>, his play about an old Jewish man (and retired high school teacher) and his younger housekeeper (and former student).<\/p>\n

\u201cI have had offers to direct other films,\u201d Horovitz confided. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t interest me. Really, I\u2019m not trying to build a hot career. But I think I\u2019ve got a couple more movies in me and I\u2019d like to make a record of what I consider to be my best work onstage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Fox<\/strong> is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Kline and Maggie Smith in Israel Horovitz\u2019s My Old Lady. (photo from Cohen Media Group) Arobust 75, the award-winning playwright, theatre director and screenwriter Israel Horovitz isn\u2019t in the market for a new career. Too bad, for his moving debut as a filmmaker, My Old Lady, is a rewarding, beautifully acted story of adults […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[4390,4392,4394,4391,4393],"class_list":["post-8039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-israel-horovitz","tag-kevin-kline","tag-kristin-scott-thomas","tag-maggie-smith","tag-tiff"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}