Fiddler on the Roof
1971
Norman Jewison
Part I
Sunny and I got together a few weeks ago to discuss the connection between a movie on the Film Club list and an episode of Reba that we had each seen a couple times. The following is a transcript of our conversation. Come back tomorrow for Part II, in which we dive into the Grannies Gone Wild of it all in a little more depth. Today, the focus is on the movie.
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Joe: Did you like the movie?
Sunny: I'd say I liked it. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I liked it. There were some things it did that were pretty good.
Joe: Do you like musicals in movie adaptation form?
Sunny: In general, I think just seeing three-hour musicals from the '70s, that itself was a pause for me. And then, I didn't know anything about what this was about, really. It's been in the ether for a while. A lot of TV shows reference it, I think I recognized that it's theater kid bait. I was watching it I think on a Sunday, I watched it from like twelve to five, with breaks. During the last hour, Kelsey came home, and looked on the screen, and was like, "Oh, Tevye!"
Joe: She knew.
Sunny: If I walked into this movie that someone was watching, I would have been like, "What the fuck is this? What is this old-timey bullshit?" [laughter]
Joe: So she had seen the movie before?
Sunny: I don't even know if she had. But she knew the play, the musical. Like Barbara Jean, earlier in her life...
Joe: Let's put a pin in the Reba thing for now. [laughter] If we can hold it.
Sunny: We'll see.
Joe: I definitely saw a community theater version of this.
Sunny: Was it also three hours?
Joe: I... don't remember anything. Which is funny. Like I remember being in the theater. I remember the man being on the roof, like the stage scenery roof, playing the fiddle. And I don't remember anything else. That might have been the play where I was like, I've seen enough of my friends' community theater productions, I'm not doing this anymore. [laughter] Not to say that it was bad! I just don't remember anything.
Sunny: I get it.
Joe: I liked it this time around. I also watched it in chunks, over the course of like four days. But it was easy to break it up. I actually accidentally paused it right before the intermission at one point, so when I popped it up again, there were twenty seconds till the intermission started. So it worked out well.
Sunny: Sure.
Joe: I... don't like musicals. Well no, I don't want to say I don't like them. I definitely am frustrated with the idea of adapting this thing that works very well on stage, into a movie. Despite the fact of what happened for me for Fiddler on the Roof in person, and I don't remember it—in general, when I go to see musicals in person, in the theater, I very much enjoy it. I think it's impressive that people are doing this on stage.
Sunny: There's something about the presence, and being in the presence, that elevates it, for sure.
Joe: Movies just can't capture that theater magic.
Sunny: It's a screen! Even with the movie magic.
Joe: It is a different type of magic, I think. And maybe that's why I'm not doing a Theater Club.
Sunny: Not yet, anyway!
Joe: I don't have the money for it. You can't steal a musical. I can't sneak into every Broadway show.
Sunny: But they're just giving away opera tickets now.
Joe: That's true! Opera Club. Coming soon to the blog. What else you got? Anything specific you want to talk about with this movie?
Sunny: Yeah. So I didn't know anything about it. I mean, just for the reader's sake, since they can't see us right now—we are eating at Laser Wolf in Fishtown. [laughter] Joe is in full kippah and tzitzit, and I brought [Editor's note: Sunny is more hip with the lingo than I am, I don't know what words he's using here] from home. I'm wearing a [Editor's note: see above].
Joe: I guess I had heard that what Laser Wolf was named after.
Sunny: That was the most I knew about this musical before watching it. [laughter]
Joe: It's a good name. A good reference.
Sunny: A great name for a restaurant. An okay name for a man and butcher.
Joe: I was glad that the movie didn't lean into the idea of Lazar Wolf being spurned by Tevye. They fought about it, but it was comedic that they were fighting over it. I think in a worse movie, that would've been the driving conflict.
Sunny: I mean, it would've been nice to see him find love I guess. But whatever. It's tough for Lazar.
Joe: I think... well, two parts. One, I think the idea of arranged marriages is interesting in pop culture. I don't have any personal experience with that type of culture that participates in that. You may have, with your ancestors?
Sunny: For sure.
Joe: And I only feel confident enough in bringing this up because of Yaadein.
Sunny: [laughter] Of course! It's a major plot point!
Joe: Yeah! It's like, here's a more modern movie—comparatively so—that is dealing with arranged marriages in a kind of similar way.
Sunny: Now that you bring it up... Yaadein is definitely the Indian Fiddler on the Roof.
Joe: Was that designed to be that way?
Sunny: I have no fucking idea. [laughter] Well, I think every Bollywood film is like that. Like 60% of them. It's the Hallmark movie version of Indian film. Because these ideas are so ingrained. But yeah, I definitely had that feeling of—this movie takes place in 1905, right? So it's two to three generations past... it's funny, Kelsey came home and was like, yeah, one of my college professors put this on, he was Jewish and he really wanted to talk about these characters, and he was like, you know, from my analysis, I only think this one daughter would have survived, because they might have been caught up in the Holocaust, and this that and the other. And she was like, wow, that's so somber. Then, watching the movie, Tevye was like, "We're going to New York City!" And I was like, wait a fucking minute... What was that guy talking about? Was he watching the same movie I was watching? [laughter]
Joe: Interesting!
Sunny: So yeah, they go to New York in 1910, right before the Roaring '20s, and then the Depression. Assuming they made it through that, which they probably would, just kinda squeaked it out in New York City. The oldest daughter would've come up with her kids in the '30s. Those kids would be of age in like the '50s. And so those kids would be Boomers. So you're thinking like four or five generations to today. It scans to me that that level of tradition—it took me a while to get to the point that this movie is both positing tradition as good and as something that should be kept together, and also sending it up and being realistic that the center cannot hold or whatever.
Joe: A major theme, I would say. We can get into it.
Sunny: Over five generations, I know very few people Jewish people who directly relate to this. In college I had a couple friends who for whatever reason I integrated with in the Russian-Jewish community, and even of them, maybe one in ten were very traditional, like "don't do anything on Sabbath," or have arranged or semi-arranged marriages, or at least matchmakers. Which I find interesting. I feel like the Indians are only two or three generations removed from it, so it's a little refresher. Which is maybe why Yaadein's a '90s movies as opposed to a '70s movie.
Joe: I'll be honest, I don't know anything about the history of arranged marriages. Is it prevalent throughout the majority of history?
Sunny: Yeah, I mean even something like Game of Thrones, right? In Anglo-Saxon times, even more so, with arranged marriages and the interbreeding of cousins and stuff, the Habsburgs and things? I'm not a historical expert, but from a materialist point of speculating, that after a while, after the accumulation of wealth and power became a thing, that it made sense to collectivize and formalize that through marriages and bloodlines. So marriage became very much a tool for that. And then over time, that became less important, and I think this movie brings it up, that there needs to be some other reason to get married then. So they're playing around with the idea of love. The movie focuses on the idea of "Did God create that love that facilitates marriage," or at least like togetherness and mating, with the lack of wealth and money exchange. And at the very start of the movie, in one of their songs, it mentions, wow, I have five daughters and none of them have a dowery. This sucks! And that's an interesting perspective to come at it, but a real perspective.
Joe: And I appreciate how they went to the other end of it, Tevye did anyway, where he starts realizing the role of love in marriage. And then he asks his wife, through song, do you love me?
Sunny: That was a tender scene.
Joe: I appreciated thinking about arranged marriages in that way. In that it's like any other relationship, friendship, anything that you would have with someone else. The circumstances in which it starts are less important than what happens when you keep going. So, we talk about, in our current culture, love at first sight. That's not necessarily the case in the vast majority of relationships, even with people who eventually fall in love and get married. You might have a spark, you might be coworkers for years, and that relationship blossoms into something. I thought that was interesting, thinking about relationships in general. How arranged marriages could work in that context.
Sunny: I agree completely. When you think about the Greeks—they're big and gay, right? They had, I don't know how many, six or eight or ten different words for "love," to characterize that there are all these different things. There's infatuation, versus whatever comes from marriage, versus friendship, versus the love of a father to a child, whatever. And I think that nuance is talked about a little bit in this movie, I think that nuance is lost in your Hallmark movies in the West. In the same way that every Indian movie is about arranged marriage, whether that's interesting or not, every Hallmark movie is the same, in that it's about them "coming home" or whatever. Me, Sam, and Pat saw the History of Concrete movie, [and in it, John Wilson] goes and watches a seminar about those Hallmark movies, and they're like "Yeah, these are cookie-cutter! This are how it works." Even the lady says, "This is not art. This is for money, this is to deliver a certain product."
Joe: But Fiddler on the Roof is not.
Sunny: Right, I think it's playing with some different ideas! It's not a Hallmark cookie-cutter movie. To me, I was worried that it was going to be an overly chastising nod to conservative values and how that's better. But actually, I don't think it was. It played both sides pretty fairly, and did a send-up of a lot of things.
Joe: It starts with talking about tradition, you mentioned that. They set that up as the theme, because maybe Tevye spends the whole movie starting to question tradition. Not explicitly, but the tradition of marriage, he's questioned in a bunch of different ways, to the point where it kind of breaks him with the third child. I would also argue that the conclusion of it, where they have to leave their home, is technically breaking tradition too. Against their will, obviously. But it's something that they have to accept, that they can't continue this tradition, with the Rabbi crying in the synagogue because they can't continue. The community is going to continue their tradition of religion as they see it, but a piece of that tradition is ruined. Overall, I think that the film is making the case that tradition is made to be questioned. And just that. Not that it's meant to be broken, because there are traditions that—
Sunny: That they are useful in ways, yeah. But I think "question" is exactly the right word. As opposed to dogmatically following them.
Joe: I would have assumed that Tevye would be that person, so I was surprised that he was eventually willing to consider other points of view.
Sunny: Yeah, the movie did a good setup of, what's his name, Perchik, the Communist rabblerouser from the big city, and the rest of the villagers are the foil to him, doing the conservative thing. And then you're right, Tevye is a surprising person who was able to see around. I guess partly because his daughters, and his love for his daughters.
Joe: Which in itself is a tradition. An important one, that families are supposed to love each other, and look out for each other. That's a tradition that he's able to hold onto. I dunno, all that stuff, thinking about that, and ignoring the whole "oh now we have ten minutes of people dancing..." It's the story itself that was worth watching.
Sunny: Agreed!
Joe: I put words to this recently, that I'm driven in my opinion on movies because of the story. The movies we watch in Film Club, I'm focused on the story, as opposed to the filmmaking itself. I'm still so weak in that, because I don't focus on it. Was there anything in the filmmaking that stood out to you, maybe a particular shot, this scene, or whatever, as opposed to the story?
Sunny: I mean, it did set a sense of place. This did feel like a turn-of-last-century tiny Jewish village. As it went through the seasons and customs, those felt well-recreated. Without a lot of special effects or extras. Closer to the fashion of theater, but it did work well on screen.
Joe: It's definitely being shot on... what do you call that, when it's not on a set...
Sunny: On location?
Joe: Yes! At the time it was made—I forget when this movie was made, early '70s?—the time period was just ending of movies like... Ben-Hur, what was that, the late '50s? A big, sweeping epic that was clearly on a soundstage. I feel like it was nice that a musical, which is originally on a stage, that it felt very natural to be outside. In a natural location.
Sunny: Agree completely. Just because it's not in my wheelhouse, I can't comment on costumes, choreography, singing and dancing. Good enough? But am I going to say it's amazing? I wouldn't be able to. I liked some of the bits and some of the songs. Some were totally, totally overdone. Like, "here's an easy thing to cut out." But I had no idea that the Gwen Stefani song, that it was ripping off Tevye?!
Joe: [laughter] I guess I did recognize that song from this. What was the name of that song?
Sunny: "Rich Girl"? I think she's covering another song from someone else, which is heavily sampling this song, "If I Were a Rich Man."
Joe: The songwriters of this song here, I wonder if they got credits.
Sunny: They to had to have. [Editor's note: Okay, so "Rich Man" by Gwen Stefani is a remake of the 1993 song "Rich Girl" by Louchie Lou & Michie One, which in turn interpolates "If I Were a Rich Man." Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote the Tevye version, and they indeed gets a songwriting credits on Stefani's song.]
Joe: I don't like that. One of my least favorite songs in the past ten years is "7 Rings" by Ariana Grande, because they, ya know, with the Rodgers and Hammerstein whatever. The Sound of Music!
Sunny: The carnivalization of America.
Joe: I don't like it. I don't like it in pop music.
Sunny: Not one of my favorite things, no.
Joe: Do you think it's easy to sympathize with the characters in this movie?
Sunny: I think I can sympathize with Tevye pretty quickly, despite... yeah, not empathize though, I can't imagine being a poor, Jewish milkman with five daughters, right? But his situation felt real. And his constant bargaining with god felt earned, and real. Just from a play-development standpoint, I appreciated that in the start, he was very explicit, like, "Yeah, I'm talking to you, God. I'm complaining." And by the middle of the movie, he's sort of staring into the distance, no vocal track, nothing. And you know what he's doing!
Joe: It's definitely a good way to... fuck, what's the phrase, when you provide information directly to the audience? What's that called? I'll look it up. I'll pretend I knew it.
Sunny: We'll get it in post.
Joe: It was a good way to do... that. Fuck! What is that called? You're not supposed to do it, in good storytelling.
Sunny: Show, not tell? Not sure if there's an actual name for it.
Joe: I'm just blanking under the pressure. But, it was a good way to do it, talking to god. As opposed to, like, just talking out loud on the stage for artistic reasons. [Editor's note: I think the word I was looking for was "exposition"?] With the sympathy stuff, I think it's very easy to sympathize with oppressed people.
Sunny: Yeah, for sure.
Joe: In art, entertainment. I don't think you have to empathize with the specifics of Tevye's life. That to know what that community is going through. That there is an oppressive force that is giving them no choice but to leave their home, or die. I... won't dig too deep into it, but I was thinking about it within the framework of the Jewish faith, and how this movie would also play very well to a Palestinian audience too. It's not that they can empathize with the details of the faith, because they have a different faith. But they can sympathize with being told by a government agency, I guess, that they have to do things they don't want to do. That they have to leave their home. So I don't know! It might be interesting to get certain takes from people on it, and whether some people has different takes on it, on being able to empathize with Jewish characters. I'll leave it there.
Sunny: Alright!
Joe: That's what was on my mind.
Sunny: It's hard to avoid it. It's hard not to think about it.
Joe: You got anything else about this movie?
Sunny: Yeah, so what's the deal with the fiddler?
Joe: Hmm. Okay. I... don't know.
Sunny: [laughter]
Joe: That's one. Two, anything I can speculate about it would be me doing the whole bullshitting thing based on something saying something already.
Sunny: At least you'd be saying something.
Joe: Okay, I don't remember the exact opening, when the fiddler was introduced, but I believe it was something like—maybe Tevye was talking to god?—and he was like, our lives are like the fiddler, where we try to stay optimistic, basically. This is a symbol of our resilience, in our poor, humble lives. So that when there are difficult situations, like being told that the Russian czar is gonna be cracking down, or he's already cracked down and now you're leaving town, the fiddler is gonna be there to remind you, in a symbolic, emotional sense, that life goes on, and there are still good things, that the fiddler will be playing there in New York, when you go to live with the uncle.
Sunny: Yeah, but they'll have a naked fiddler there.
Joe: [laughter] Exactly. So that's, gun to my head... that's not an original thought, I know.
Sunny: It's as good as anything I got.
Joe: You're right, though, that that's important about, if that's the name of the movie.
Sunny: I guess I just thought that, based on the name of the movie, it would be a more important character. But he's sort of hanging out.
Joe: Did he exist?
Sunny: Right! Is he real? Maybe that's my real question. Does anyone else see him, or just Tevye?
Joe: I would assume no. I tried to make that argument in the Candyman Zoom, and no one was into it. [laughter] So I don't want to lean to hard on that again. But, like, he doesn't talk, right?
Sunny: Nope. He's just fiddling. No one else even looks at him or addresses him. Even though he's fiddlin' when they're all fiddlin' away. Fiddlin' to America.
Joe: He doesn't exist.
Sunny: Put it there.
Joe: Completely symbolic.
Sunny: And the roof is symbolic too...
Joe: Oh, and what would you grade this?
Sunny: Ehhh... 3.5.
Joe: I buy that. I'll stick with 3.5 pukes out of 5 too. That's usually the "I enjoyed watching this, enjoyed pulling some themes out of it, but didn't feel any of the elation that the true movie magic."
Sunny: Yeah, it didn't feel too deep. Not trying to cue it up again.
Joe: Okay, so.... Barbara Jean.
Sunny: Yeah.
Joe: Let's tap in.
Please come back tomorrow for the second half of our conversation, which is centered around a sitcom character from Reba, but also continuously ties in additional thoughts about Fiddler on the Roof. I'll update this sentence with a hyperlink once Part II is published!
NEXT TIME: Excited for another Linklater film, this time A Scanner Darkly, coming to you in only a couple days.
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Please come back tomorrow for the second half of our conversation, which is centered around a sitcom character from Reba, but also continuously ties in additional thoughts about Fiddler on the Roof. I'll update this sentence with a hyperlink once Part II is published!
NEXT TIME: Excited for another Linklater film, this time A Scanner Darkly, coming to you in only a couple days.
