The Song of Names: Powerful music and occasional profundity overcome Holocaust drama's narrative slog

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

It makes sense that a film from the director of The Red Violin and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould would be able to point to musical moments as its saving grace.

That, and some powerful thoughts about the role of religion in the face of inhumanity, and the inescapability of one’s Jewishness, are what raises François Girard’s The Song of Names above its prosaic, old-school narrative, full of flashbacks and fast-forwards.

Real life violin prodigy Luke Doyle entertains an audience in a bomb shelter in The Song of Names

Adapted from the novel by Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names opens with a no-show. A VIP crowd in the early ‘50s is waiting at a London concert hall for the debut performance of a young violin phenom named Dovidl Rapaport, a musical event dutifully reported live on the radio. Behind the scenes, a middle-aged man and his son are visibly crushed by the violinist’s disappearance.

A sepia-toned flashback later, and it’s 1939, and a Polish Jew named Zygmunt Rapoport (Jakub Kotynski) is trying to secure lessons in England for his arrogant son (played by real-life violin prodigy Luke Doyle, who convincingly and jaw-droppingly makes the strings dance and sing). The desperate trip is as much to secure a haven for Dovidl ahead of the Nazi invasion of Poland as to nurture his God-given talent.

Enter music promoter Gilbert Simmonds (Stanley Townsend), who dips into his own pocket to provide a home and lessons for the boy (to the initial consternation of Simmonds’ own son Martin, played as a boy by Misha Handley). Dovidl and Martin’s friendship and estrangement would cover three time periods and six actors, the most marquee-worthy of them being Clive Owen and Tim Roth, in an ‘80s timeframe.

All events spring from and lead to the no-show in question, of course. Martin, who blames Dov for his father’s broken heart and death, becomes obsessed with tracking his “brother’s” movements in subsequent years, desperate to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, Martin’s unsympathetic wife (Catherine McCormack) simply wishes he’d leave the past behind.

Without getting into details, the mystery revolves around the Jewish funeral ceremony the Kaddish, while the title refers to a song created by survivors of Treblinka to remember the dead. The latter was entirely created by Canadian soundtrack great Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and it is haunting indeed, as is the rest of his musical contribution.

Anything else arresting about this movie belongs to the character of Dovidl. There is a “dueling violins” moment in a bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe raid when Dovidl and his chief rival, a teenaged fellow virtuoso have at it, taking the shelter-ees’ minds off their life-threatening circumstances.

But Dovidl’s most interesting phase is at college age (played by Jonah Hauer-King), when the enormity of what happened in Warsaw hits him, though the actual fate of his family remains unknown. His confusion and unfocused grief leads him to undertake a ceremony to renounce his religion, though he understands on some level the futility of that act (“All the baptism in the world couldn’t wash the Jew out of Jesus”).

But for some reason, whenever the narrative returns to Martin, it seems to take the steam out of the movie. Martin’s quest is often tedious, eventually reaching the point of “find him already!”

Oddly, the two characters are like a Rorschach test for viewers. Some resent Dovidl for engaging in a spiritual quest that profoundly hurts the people closest to him. Others blame Martin for failing to appreciate that finding one’s self in millennia-old traditions, and reconciling the loss of one’s family amid the most monstrous act of the 20th Century, just might be more important than a mere concert and public acclaim.

The pieces are there for a profound piece of work, and The Song of Names’ high points are worth the occasional narrative slog.

The Song of Names. Directed by Francois Girard. Adapted by Jeffrey Caine from the novel by Norman Lebrecht. Stars Tim Roth, Luke Doyle and Clive Owen. Opens Wednesday, December 25 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with a wide Canadian release January 10.