Biography. Unrated. At the Chez Artiste.
Sporting a pen name that doubled as a greeting (“hello how are you” or “peace be upon you”) as well as a five-syllable taste of Jewish shtetl life, the writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) is best known for creating Tevye the dairyman, later the subject of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Wonderfully rich, like one of Tevye’s monologues, Joseph Dorman’s “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness” captures the spirit of a man and his times.
Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much-anguished history, and Aleichem’s inspired literary response to that history, have difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length.
Yet Dorman’s touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous. The greatest-ever writer in Yiddish, a chronicler of Eastern European Jewry and truly universal triumphs and laments, exerted a worldwide influence that, today, can be found in the films of the Coen brothers, in the forthcoming new Israeli comedy “Footnote” (which includes a scene from “Fiddler”) and a thousand other works.
Dorman mixes archival photographs and film footage, primarily from the 1939 film “Tevye” and the 1971 “Fiddler.” Each scholar tapped for an opinion or an insight helps our understanding of the subject. That’s the idea with all documentaries, of course, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
“Laughing in the Darkness” hits all the biographical high points; more important, it brings its droll, skeptical, inventive protagonist to life and finds a way to work in the spirit of its own subject.
