“Dunkelman. Do you know what kind of name that is?”
“Well it certainly aint Irish”
“It’s Jewish”
With these words begins the turbulent relationship between Danny Dunkelman (David Strathairn), a progressive, liberal lawyer and his client Michael Downey (Andrew Walker), an embittered self-declared ‘foot soldier of the Aryan resistance’, who’s inside for a racially motivated murder.
The film pits Danny’s preconceptions of Michael against his humanist outlook and Michael escalates Danny’s predicament: “In an ideal world I’d have you eliminated. In this world I need you more than ever”, he sneers.
Adapted from a successful stage play by co-director David Gow, most scenes are set inside a single cell in a Canadian penitentiary. Other characters are drafted in for the big screen but what makes and is the film is the tense dialogue between Danny and Michael, culminating in unabated, excruciating anti-Semitic rhetoric. Danny’s deepest nerve has been slit and his inner conflict intensifies, making the challenge seem insurmountable.
Stunning perfomances from Strathairn and Walker, together with Gow’s script make this a scintillating interpretation of racial and religious intolerance.
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