Movie Review: Focus (2001)

I watched the wonderful William H. Macy (a national treasure) and Laura Dern shine in this drama based on an Arthur Miller book about anti-semitic prejudice in WWII-era America. Meat Loaf Aday is solid in a supporting role, and the journeyman actor, David Paymer, is a stand-out as Fickelstein, the corner grocer.

Neil Slavin, photographer-turned-director, has this to say about his motivation for directing the movie:

[from Interview With Neil Slavin by Cynthia Fuchs]

I was an art student in New York and we had to take humanities classes, which were beneath us artistic types: we loved reading but doing term papers was just not our style. For this one, we could pick any book we wanted, and I went to the library — at that time there was no internet, it was around 1962 — and found this book by Arthur Miller. It just blew me away. It was about this pair of glasses: I like to work on visual levels that mean something, not, “Gee, isn’t that a nice light?” but something that works symbolically too. It also had New York in it, that sense of New York, the boroughs where I grew up, and it had a message about civil rights. I thought, “Wait a minute, this goes beyond my term paper.” A man puts on a pair of glasses, and it’s like makeup: do you look different, really? For the purposes of the book, you do. Plus, you go behind the glasses and you look out and suddenly the world changes. So Larry Newman puts on the glasses and sees much more of the world than he ever wanted to see.