Stephen Lang’s name isn’t the first one that’s synonymous with “kindly old man,” nor with “elderly Holocaust survivor.” But in director Finn Taylor’s The Optimist, he’s both, and while the movie doesn’t entirely come together, Lang’s convincing. He was raised Jewish and quotes Moshe Dayan in interviews. He’s spent most of his career playing soldiers, villains, and tough guys, including as the main antagonist in the Avatar films. This is a rare shot at a starring role, and he makes the most of it.
In The Optimist, subtitled The Bravest Act is Truth, Lang plays Herbert Heller, a real-life Holocaust survivor whose father and brother were killed by the Nazis, although Herbert made a daring escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was just 15.
Heller came to the United States in 1946, ending up in Northern California, where he opened a toy store, raised a family, and spent the ensuing six decades not speaking about his story to anyone, even his own children. He burned over his tattooed numbers, telling his family the scar was the result of an accident. (Heller died in 2021, when the film was already in development; you can read his testimonial in the United States Holocaust Museum’s oral history archives.)
The way the film tells it, what spurred Heller to finally tell his story was a terminal health diagnosis, and that he met a troubled teenage girl named Abby (Elsie Fisher, from Eighth Grade) with a horrible backstory of her own, and the two decided to tell each other the story of their scars.
And this is where The Optimist steps wrongly. It jumps back and forth between telling Heller and Abby’s stories. Both are worthy of a film, but they don’t fit together. The biggest problem is that we know, from the beginning, the gravity of Heller’s story, although with Abby, the seriousness of what happened is ladled out much more slowly. Bad as what we ultimately find out happened with her, Heller’s story has the giant sweep of history; hers doesn’t. There was no Abby; her story, I gather, is a composite of teenagers whom Heller met while sharing his Holocaust story in his final years.
The Optimist is well-mounted, with both Lang and Fisher delivering performances that match the gravity of the material. The production does an especially good job creating Heller’s native Prague, as well as his time in Auschwitz and the subsequent death march. But a story like Heller’s could’ve been told without the counterweight of a fictitious parallel plot.