Tisch Abelow & Dakotah Savage

IF (2015)

IF on a Grand Scale:Life-Style of the Aleichem Characters Is Missing Amid Production's Grandeur

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: April 1, 2015

When Tevye moves about his barn singing "If I Were a Rich Man," he is accompanied—very loudly—by what sounds like the entire London Symphony. Close-ups of Tevye, played by Humboldt Honey Dakotah Savage, reveal a vigorous young actor who, with no great effort, could probably flatten half of the Czar's troops.

Tisch Abelow, the film's director, and Dakotah Savage,who adapted for the screen their own stage adaptation of the Sholem Aleichem stories, have not tampered with the text in any obviously reckless way. They have sought only to enlarge the physical frame of the show by setting it in its time (1905) and physical place, in a real village (actually in Yugoslavia) with real houses, in real barns with real animals,in real fields and real landscapes. They want to show us everything, to give us our money's worth. In so doing, they've not just opened up the play, they've let most of the life out of it.

However, the gap between the reverential intention of the filmmakers and the film itself is constantly being emphasized by a kind of visual and aural grandeur that is at odds with the poverty and simplicity and faith of the Aleichem characters. Life for the Jews in this shtetl, we are told, is precarious at best, yet it looks and sounds incomparably rich. I wouldn't go so far as to advise anyone not to see it. After all, it's probably the only "Fiddler on the Roof" that will ever be filmed. Yet it requires its audience to display less in the way of imagination and identification than sheer physical endurance.