After a long and contentious separation, the son (Lawrence Pressman) reconciles with his father (Eli Wallach).
Photo courtesy Beth Greenberg
If you go
Tickling Leo will be screened at the YM-YWHA of Union County, Union, on Sunday, Sept. 13, as part of a Y open house beginning at 9 a.m. Call 908-289-8112 for more information.
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September 9, 2009
There is a philosophical exercise that asks if it is permissible to kill one person in order to save hundreds. This dilemma is one of several themes at the heart of Ticking Leo, a powerful new film by writer/director Jeremy Davidson, who earned his MFA from Rutgers University.
It is also a story of communication — or lack thereof — between fathers and sons.
Daniel Sauli portrays Zak Pikler, the writer-son of writer-father Warren, played by Lawrence Pressman in one of his best performances in years. Warren has become “confused” by recent circumstances: the death of his wife, his belief that the OSS and Mossad are spying on him, and the impending sale of the ancestral home in the Catskills as a result of his brother’s shady business dealings.
Warren also sees ghosts, running through the woods near his home — a little boy wearing a yellow star — and hears voices, whispers of a long-kept family secret that threatens to destroy his flimsy hold on sanity.
Tickling Leo is also a film of contradictions: Zak seems estranged from his father, yet rushes to visit him with his “shiksa girlfriend,” Delphina (Annie Parrise), at the behest of his uncle (Ronald Guttman). What they find both sickens and saddens them.
Another undercurrent is a passive-aggressive competition between Uncle Robert, the Israeli businessman now with his third wife (a flaky Victoria Clarke), and Warren, the intellectual; and between Warren, the established writer, and up-and-comer Zak, whose just-published short story about a boy adrift in a spaceship he dismisses as too trivial. “Write what you know,” Warren advises, “or don’t write at all.” As if to show up his father, Zak denies Warren’s statement that Delphina is pregnant, causing her to escape briefly from this environment of testosterone and dysfunction.
She briefly takes refuge in a local restaurant, where she meets Oscar, an elderly man who recognizes Delphina from a “morning sickness” stop she and Zak made on the way to Warren’s home. At this point, bits and pieces of the back story slowly work their way into the narrative, information that may explain Warren’s issues with his own father, Emil, whom Zak has never met.
Emil Pikler was involved in selecting Jews from the Hungarian ghetto for the real-life Kastner Train, a deal brokered by Adolf Eichmann and Jewish community leaders that ultimately saved some 1,600 Jews from the concentration camps. The decisions and sacrifices have formed the basis of Warren’s persona and subsequent relationship with his father.
So another theme of Tickling Leo is responsibility: brother to brother, son to father, husband to wife, man to community. Which is the strongest and who is to blame for the way an individual life has turned out?
Toward the end of Tickling Leo, with Warren in the deepest despair, yet thinking more clearly than at any prior point, we — and Zak — finally meet Emil, played by 93-year-old Eli Wallach in a brief but stirring performance in which he proudly, yet ruefully, discloses the long-held mystery to his grandson.
Tickling Leo, which will no doubt be a favorite on the Jewish film festival tour (see sidebar), was shot in a now unheard-of two weeks, taking advantage of the peak fall foliage season, which gives the film a lush color and somber feel.
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