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Verdict: Often goes off track, but headed in the right direction.

Details: Starring Lionel Abelanski and Rufus. Directed by Radu Mihaileanu. Rated R for brief nudity and sexuality. In French with subtitles. 1 hour, 43 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: About the only things missing from "Train of Life" are Robin Williams shouting "All aboard!" and Roberto Benigni going "Toot! Toot!"

Actually, that's a harsher take than intended, because this movie is better, in its way, than either "Jakob the Liar" or "Life Is Beautiful." Yes, it's another wish-fulfillment comedy with a Holocaust theme, but it has two things going for it: an inventive premise and a kick-in-the-gut coda that's straight out of the Taviani brothers' sublime "Night of the Shooting Stars."

Winner of the audience award at last year's Sundance Film Festival, "Train of Life" begins in 1941 in an isolated shtetl in Eastern Europe. Rumors of Nazi deportation of Jews are confirmed by Shlomo (Lionel Abelanski), the lowly village idiot who also, in many ways, serves as the film's silent narrator. The rabbi and his counselors are thrown into a panic, but Shlomo has an idea: Why not create their own deportation train and fool the Nazis into thinking they're headed for a concentration camp? Some villagers will be instructed in German and play Nazis. The rest will play, well, Jews.

It's actually an ingenious idea for a picture, a kind of variation on 1965's "Von Ryan's Express," in which Frank Sinatra led a group of escaping prisoners of war on much the same adventure. But filmmaker Radu Mihaileanu too often opts for low humor and who-cares politics. Sure enough, the villagers designated to "play" Nazis start taking themselves a bit seriously, while the deportees begin arguing among themselves. Most tediously, a splinter Communist group emerges to make trouble.

Still, there are some sublime moments. A run-in with a truck convoy of faux-Nazi Gypsies trying the same desperate gambit is worthy of Emir Kusturica. And underneath the farcical shenanigans, there's an aura of sadness and regret fathered by the film's you-saw-it-coming-but-you-didn't framework. This is, after all, a tale told by an idiot.

Much of the plot is straight out of a "Hogan's Heroes" episode, with easily duped real Nazis and clumsy "Heil Hitler" jokes. And most of the cast, alas, attack their roles as if they were rejects from a road company of "Fiddler on the Roof." There are exceptions — notably Abelanski, whose fool's dream offers unexpected resonance, and Rufus as the pretend Nazi officer who feels all too heavily his responsibility.

Allegedly, "Train of Life" pre-dates "Life Is Beautiful." If so, Benigni owes Mihaileanu an apology, an Oscar or something. But even without having its thunder stolen, the picture's embrace of cuteness over cleverness, of stereotypes over challenges, weakens it. Here, finally, is a subtitled (it's in French) movie that Hollywood probably could do better. Maybe someone will try.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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