Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 12/11
FOUR SEASONS LODGE
First Run Features
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed by: Andrew Jacobs
Written By: Andrew Jacobs
Cast: Hymie Abramowitz, Tosha Abramowitz, Aron Adelman, Basie Adelman, Olga Bowman, Eugenia "Genya" Boyman, Tobias Buchman, Carl Potok, Cesia Potok, Lola Wenglin
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/21/09
Opens: November 11, 2009
If living well is the best revenge, then living long and well as a Holocaust survivor is the best revenge against Hitler. In "Four Seasons Lodge," Andrew Jacobs hones in on a group of Auschwitz survivors originally from Poland, Hungary and Austria who get together year after year at the same resort in New York’s Catskill mountains to kibitz, play cards, dance, exchange jokes, mourn losses, kvetch, and fight against a decision to dissolve the colony after twenty-six years. The folks are mostly in their eighties, a few in their seventies, one who is ninety-one—a dying breed who illustrate the cliché that as the years roll on we have fewer and fewer living witnesses to the most horrific event of the Twentieth Century. As explained by the folks at the lodge, since babies and old people were killed upon arrival at the camp, those who were teens are now in their eighties, more or less, and, well, here they are.
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Hymie Abramowitz serves as the group’s leader, its president, the man behind the decision to give up the resort because "it’s time to pack it in." He’s fed up with all the unpaid labor he’s doing, running about in his golf cart because people locked their keys in their cars or are not sure whether they left the gas on and they’re locked out of their bungalows or face a myriad of problems that can be solved only by a jack-of-all-trades. He’s also the camp atheist, the One Who Wonders How God Could Have Allowed The Holocaust, going against the vast majority who get together on Friday nights to pray in Hebrew while women light the candles, covering their heads with napkins, closing their eyes while wishing simchas for their children.
Hitler may have tried to shorten their lives by sixty-five years, but nature is now taking its toll. The members of Four Seasons Lodge used to be able to pack away, as one fellow testifies, several dozen bottles of liquor in a few hours (yes, Virginia, Jews drink) but now they’re lucky to polish of a couple of Jack Daniels in the same time. Yet the place is not a sedate nursing home by a long shot as the folks dance not only the hora but try to keep up with the modern steps to live bands while laughing their butts off to some tired, risqué jokes by one of a dying breed of borscht comedians.
The Nazis would have been stunned had they been able to see films sixty-five years later of these folks tucking away dozens of bagels with mountains of cream cheese and lox, many of them possessing late-model cars despite not having worked for a decade or so. "Four Seasons Lodge" may not convince Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust occurred—he’s much too thick in the head to process such obvious information—and I wish we could have heard more details but the people in the Catskills "don’t want to talk about it." In the library of Holocaust-themed movies, though, this picture finds a happy, original niche. L’chaim!
FOUR SEASONS LODGE (First Run Features)
Unrated.
98 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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