Up the Wrong Tree

This is a movie about a seemingly worthless guy who nonetheless holds your sympathy because he spends the film's time refusing to give up on an apparently lost cause. Two of them in fact. Winning back his girlfriend and adding a green spot to the city. (Israelis will recognize the site of a former industrial zone in Ramat Gan.) This is the kind of story, about down-at-heel people elevated by their craziness, that Saroyan used to do well. There is a comical tension between the insignificance of the people and the greatness of their determination, and there is a heartwarming paradox in the way that they treat each other with a casually loving fellowship even when they are at loggerheads with one another. Over the whole story hangs the "foma," as Vonnegut would call it-- the harmless untruth-- that these people have been, and will be, repeatedly reincarnated until they work out all their problems with one another. The plot occasionally becomes unrealistic or even surrealistic, but the actors make everything believable. In fact, it must be a pleasure to act this material-- and foreign filmmakers could easily adapt it. It could even be staged as a play.