by Hudson Moura
Sean McNamara’s Bau, Artist at War attempts to capture the remarkable life of Joseph Bau—a Holocaust survivor, document forger, caricaturist, and later, one of Israel’s most beloved artists—through a blend of dramatic biography and sentimental reflection. Emile Hirsch plays Bau, from his youth in the Krakow Ghetto and concentration camps to his postwar life in Israel. Based on Bau’s own autobiography, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?, the film presents itself as a tribute to a man whose art, humor, and resilience defied the cruelty of his circumstances. But while the film is rich in source material and historical significance, it rarely achieves the emotional depth or narrative cohesion that its subject demands.
Set across multiple time periods and locations, Bau, Artist at War opens in 1971 in Tel Aviv, where an older Joseph is seen working on forged documents for the Mossad—proof that even decades after the war, his subversive talents remain unchanged. When approached by a lawyer to testify in the trial of a Nazi who tortured him, Joseph refuses to revisit his past. A friend insists it’s not about going back, but moving forward. The film then unspools in flashback, switching to black and white for the war years—a clear homage to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List—and tracking Bau’s journey from the Krakow Ghetto to Plaszow concentration camp, and finally to Schindler’s factory. The Spielberg’s influence sometimes feels too direct, inviting comparisons that do not favor McNamara’s film.
Throughout the narrative, the viewer is guided—or rather, overguided—by a cascade of intertitles indicating time, place, and characters with a rigidity that undermines the film’s emotional flow. “Krakow Ghetto,” “Kommandant Goeth’s Private Villa,” “Liquidation of Plaszow,” “Brunnlitz Armament Factory,” and so on: these textual interruptions, while presumably meant to lend documentary precision, the sheer volume of on-screen text risks overwhelming the viewer, reducing lived trauma into a checklist of locations and dates. It’s an archival impulse that often pulls attention away from the characters themselves.
At the heart of the story is Bau’s relationship with art as a survival mechanism. His talent for forgery is both a narrative anchor and a thematic thread. During the war, he is conscripted to produce maps and technical drawings for the Nazi command—a position that spares him the worst of the camp’s violence, even as it places him daily before a giant portrait of Hitler, the Führer watching over each stroke of his pen. His artistic skills—both during the war and afterward—was not only strategic but also subversive. “Your fear is their greatest weapon,” Joseph tells his father while burning a cartoon that mocks the Nazis. His drawings, often humorous in tone, offer brief moments of light in the otherwise monochrome horrors of the camps. He entertains fellow prisoners, creates small comic cards to lift spirits, and sketches scenes that ridicule Nazi guards. “Nazis can’t take a joke,” he adds later, a defiant punchline that embodies his spirit of survival through art. But while the film gestures toward the power of these images, it rarely lets them speak. The drawings appear on screen, yet the camera hurries past them, offering neither space for contemplation nor integration into the broader storytelling. The camera lingers just long enough for recognition, but not long enough for reflection. They function more as props than as a narrative device or symbolic layer, limiting their emotional and thematic impact. There is untapped potential in these images, which could have served as counterpoints or emotional accelerants, rather than mere evidence of Bau’s talent.
The tonal shifts are another challenge. The film vacillates between light melodrama and grim historical chronicle, occasionally inserting gestures toward humor or romance that jar against the brutality of its setting. A wedding inside a concentration camp between Joseph and Rebecca, though based on real events and later referenced in Schindler’s List, is depicted with a softness that borders on implausibility and these moments feel at odds with the surrounding scenes of torture and trauma. It’s a delicate line to walk, and the film does not always succeed in navigating it.
The gifted actor Emile Hirsch portrays Joseph with visible conviction, but his mannerisms and over fail to fully convince. Meanwhile, the Nazi characters are portrayed as one-dimensional sadists, which, while historically grounded in the reality of systemic dehumanization, flattens the dramatic stakes. Cruelty becomes predictable, and suffering risks becoming repetitive rather than revelatory.
The Nazis are rendered in the broadest possible terms—uniformly sadistic, smirking, and brutal. Their cruelty is portrayed with theatrical flair, but without psychological nuance. This one-dimensional portrayal diminishes the dramatic stakes, not because their violence is in any way unjustified, but because their flatness as characters undercuts the emotional complexity of Jewish suffering. When evil is cartoonish, resistance begins to feel fictional too.
The film’s biggest missed opportunity may be its treatment of Rebecca Bau. Though the story is framed as a love story between Joseph and Rebecca—“based on a true love story,” reads the opening credit—Rebecca’s character remains underwritten, her narrative secondary to that of her husband. Their separation during the war—he to Schindler’s factory, she to Auschwitz—is mentioned, but never emotionally explored. The final credits, however, shower us with biographical information about Joseph’s postwar life, including his work with the Mossad, his reputation as “the Walt Disney of Israel,” and his inclusion in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. These end cards feel endless—less like closure and more like hagiography. While they reinforce the real-life heroism of Joseph Bau, they also expose the film’s unease with narrative economy and cinematic subtlety.
Bau, Artist at War is ultimately a film of strong intentions and scattered execution. It brings to light a life that richly deserves to be remembered, especially in a time when artistic resistance and historical memory are under threat. But it does so with a heavy hand, unsure whether to mourn, to laugh, or to celebrate—and so it does all three, but never with full conviction. The story of Joseph Bau is astonishing, resilient, and quietly radical. The film about him, though heartfelt, only occasionally rises to meet that same standard.
3.5/5
In theatres September 26, 2025.