Jesse Eisenberg plays the legendary performer who helped thousands of Jews escape the Nazis, in a well-meaning but cliche-ridden biopic
A handsomely produced and well-meaning movie, but freighted with cliche, about the remarkable wartime career of mime legend Marcel Marceau in the French resistance. He helped thousands of Jewish children and adults escape Nazi-occupied France. It’s a very notable story but this is another of those sepia second world war films for which there continues to be a solid market.
Preposterously, the action is supposed to be narrated in flashback by General Patton (a cameo for Ed Harris) as he addresses the serried ranks of the US troops who have just liberated France, telling them the story of one of that country’s most amazing civilian heroes – Marceau. (The troops are supposed to have remained standing for the entire length of the story.) Jesse Eisenberg plays Marceau, the young Chaplin superfan who uses his flair for
comedy and mime to gladden the hearts of the Jewish orphans in
France under his care before the Nazi invasion, the same children that he would have to save from the death camps.