by Rick Groen
Toronto Globe and Mail
December 17, 1999
Directed by Istvan Szabo
Written by Istvan Szabo
and Israel Horovitz
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Jennifer Ehle,
Rosemary Harris, William Hurt
Classification: R
Rating: **½
Like any multigenerational saga, Sunshine is obliged to serve two masters at once: It wants simultaneously to be personal and epic, using the story of a particular family as the template for the history of an entire era. Of course, that practice is common in fiction and standard in fact, where journalists are forever trying to "humanize" sweeping events with anecdotal portraits. But the tricky bit is to integrate the split halves of the equation, to make the personal seem an organic part of the epic, preventing the tale from oscillating clumsily between one function and the other -- here a spoonful of dramatic sugar, there a bottle of historical medicine.
You can see Sunshine struggling hard with this problem, and not always successfully. The country is Hungary, the time span is the whole of the 20th century, and the family in question is the Sonnenscheins. Headed by Emmanuel the kindly patriarch, they begin as an affluent clan of Jewish merchants whose fortune is based in the distillery business -- seems their "Sunshine tonic" is an especially popular libation.
We pick them up during a relatively peaceful hiatus in the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, then follow the son Ignatz, grandson Adam, and great-grandson Ivan (all played by Ralph Fiennes) through the succeeding decades of political and social upheaval. As revolution leads to counter-revolution, and dictators of the right give way to despots from the left, these three generations serve as the collective feet of history's long march. So the script, by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo with an assist from the playwright Israel Horovitz, contrives to treat the trio of Sonnenscheins both as credible characters and as convenient symbols, each representing an evolving take on the movie's central theme of cultural assimilation and its attendant dangers.
Encouraged by his proud father, Ignatz is a political pragmatist who rises to the status of a judge, paving the way by changing the family name to a "more Hungarian-sounding" moniker. The First World War ends, a military government replaces the fallen Empire, and the undercurrent of anti-Semitism surfaces and turns virulent. Enter Adam, a gifted fencer who, adopting the athlete's apolitical stance, converts to Catholicism to further his competitive career and win the ultimate prize -- a gold medal at the '36 Olympics in Berlin.
Another world war comes and goes, the Nazis and their Hungarian allies perpetrate their genocidal horrors, and a vengeful Ivan emerges as a true believer in the saving grace of Communism, only to have his faith shaken by the Soviet invasion in '56.
Meanwhile, enduring all these upheavals, the stalwart figure of Valerie (Jennifer Ehle in her youth, Rosemary Harris as she ages) doubles as a constant reminder of the family's prevailing spirit. A photographer, she's the film's artist-figure and the director's alter ego, the passionate observer who sidesteps every orthodoxy to steer by her own aesthetic light. "I've always tried to photograph what's beautiful in life," Valerie proclaims, and then adds the coda, "But it hasn't been easy." For her, life is not a solid rock of unwavering belief, but occasional shards of redemptive joy.
Certainly, those bright shards exist in this film. For Szabo, it's clearly a three-hour labour of love, which he and cinematographer Lajos Koltai have invested with the visual splendour traditional to period epics. And there are isolated moments of arresting power: Amid the winter chill of a death camp, a grisly crucifixion pose -- a naked body gets slowly encased in a cocoon of suffocating ice -- is both macabre and memorable. The same might be said of a transfixing sequence where the family gathers before a radio, straining to hear whether new discriminatory laws will brand them all as Jews or allow some to escape through legislative loopholes.
Finally, the large cast -- including Molly Parker, Deborah Kara Unger, William Hurt and Rachel Weisz -- is uniformly strong, with the ubiquitous Fiennes at his tour-de-force best. He manages to distinguish his characters while still showing us their inherited similarities -- the slight timidity of the social-climbing judge, the flashy bravado of the consummate sportsman, the emerging sensitivity of the lapsed Communist -- all different, yet all connected by a genuine love for their native land.
Too often, however, the script falls into that bad habit typical of the multigenerational saga, lurching from bald melodrama (divorces, affairs) to speechy rhetoric ("Hungary courts disaster by following Germany"), to overblown metaphors (shattered teacups keep presaging imminent tempests). Although it deals with similar ideas of power shifts and moral compromises, this movie lacks the subtlety of such earlier Szabo masterworks as Mephisto and Colonel Redl.
Perhaps part of the reason is that Szabo is not working in Hungarian here. Instead, he's compelled by today's assimilative pressures -- by the global reach and vernacular of cultural commerce -- to shoot his picture in English. And so, when our artist-figure proclaims, "I want to be proud of my own language," the line is delivered in a language not her own. With that irony unaddressed, the sentiment rings hollow and the intended inspiration goes flat. In that sense, and to that degree, Sunshine is eclipsed by the very forces it means to combat.
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