Focus Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)November 20th, 2001
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Somewhere between Pussy Galore's song "You Look Like a Jew" and the Reverend Martin Niemoller's 1945 quote about "them" coming for the Communists and the Jews and the Catholics is Arthur Miller's anti-Semitism novel (written in the same year as Niemoller's famous passage) called Focus. It's a nifty little number with a great lead performance from the always reliable William H. Macy, and given some of the recent anti-Arab sentiment since the 9/11 attacks, quite timely as well.
Focus is set in 1944 Brooklyn, where Macy (Jurassic Park 3) plays Lawrence Newman, a quiet, polite single man who lives with his handicapped mother (Kay Hawtrey) and works as a personnel manager overseeing a pool of typists. Newman is a slave to his daily routines, but seems to enjoy even the most tedious tasks at home and at work. Newman's life begins to unravel, however, when he witnesses a rape and murder outside his bedroom window in the middle of the night. Afraid of starting trouble, he tells no one about the incident, even though the guilt is clearly eating away at him. But who could blame him, especially if you've got a neighbor like Fred (Meat Loaf Aday, Fight Club), who is busy organizing meetings to combat the infiltration of "kikes" and "niggers" into the lily-white neighborhood.
Things at the office start to get a little bumpy, too. Newman is reprimanded for hiring a Jewish employee, and his superior suggests he buy a pair of glasses to help him weed out the unwanted element. When he finally relents and purchases the specs, people begin to mistake Newman for a Jew (his mother even says he should have bought the rimless kind), and his improved eyesight causes him to carefully examine new recruits at work. One applicant is Gertrude Hart (Laura Dern, Novocaine), and Newman brushes her off because of her name, despite her claims to be Episcopalian. To make matters worse, he's forced to move his office so customers won't see him and think the business is "one of those" kind of companies.
Things begin to get progressively worse for Newman and Finkelstein (David Paymer, State and Main), the Jewish newsstand owner who has become the target of the local chapter of the Union Crusaders. The second act is somewhat flat, and parts of the film are a little heavy-handed, especially Newman's nightmares about the cogs of a carousel spinning out of control. But first-time director Neal Slavin does a decent job building the tension in both Newman and the audience, although Focus is no Do the Right Thing, which was also about racial intolerance in a Brooklyn neighborhood albeit set some 50 years later. And if the dialogue reminds you of David Mamet, remember Macy has been in five of his features, plus two more that he merely penned.
1:44 - PG-13 for thematic material, violence and some sexual content
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