Racism isn't always violent, verbal or obvious. It is usually so subtle and invisible that even those who have racist tendencies don't even realize that they are there. This deals with subconscious feelings of antisemitism, still prevalent more than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust. It's a story of one's own need to accept their heritage, to face their own prejudices towards their own background. Troubled teenager Claire Danes has trouble with her Jewish heritage even though she loves her Holocaust surviving grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) more than her own parents. Their relationship is one of a brutal honesty, and Danes must undergo her own hurts to come to terms with the legacy of decades before.While Danes is excellent, it's the very real, haunting performance by the legendary Jeanne Moreau that really strikes gold here. She wears the Auschwitz numbers on her arm, not because she has no choice, but because she has to, for her own survival, to teach the lessons of tolerance, to educate to prevent future atrocities, to help her beloved granddaughter accept herself. I once knew a lady who does what Moreau did here, going to school to share her experiences, always with a glow on her face, that victory over death, simply because she survived. I often wondered if she was asked all of the dumb questions from naive and insensitive high school students. Questions like, Did you know Anne Frank? Did you ever see Hitler?, etc., and more realistic, caring questions like, Did your family survive?There's the subplot between Danes and hunky Jude Law, the most popular boy in her class, who awakens Danes to her feelings and allows Danes to reveal who she is. He isn't revealed to be antisemitic, just frustrated by her inability to relax, and it is his frustration with her that leads her to finally un-bottle all of the insecurities inside her. While her sufferings are minor compared to get grandmother's, she needs something to pull her out of that shell.

I didn't expect a lot from this film, but I thought it would be worth a try. There were about two points during the first 35 minutes in which I was going to turn it off. It wasn't that interesting, and it was slow-moving. But, I have liked some things Clare Danes has been in, especially Temple Grandin, so I stuck with it. About the time that Daisy starts to see some fruit in her teenage crush, it really picked up and I was glad I had kept watching. Soon after that, though, it continued to be disappointing. Jude Law's character is not consistent; sometimes he's nice, and sometimes his character is just dull. I don't think that was really in the acting of Jude, but more in the writing. This was the absolute worst acting I've ever seen Claire Danes. I bet she's embarrassed about this film now. She went from being, at times, a mature young lady to other times seeming like a nine-year-old, emotionally. Her acting reminded me of an 11-year-old in a school play thinking that she was acting, so she had to be dramatic. Claire has wild swings of being skittishly excited and kind of queer (in the "immature" sense of that term). Her voice fluctuations were hard to take. Oh, and then there's the plot. Lots of dream sequences that don't really fully connect and an attempt in the writing to connect two separate themes and three separate locations that just came off disjointed. There were scenes that just seemed to be bad editing, that didn't follow. Don't waste your time; see another Claire Danes film.

At this date so far from the event, if some young person asked me what movie they could watch which would give them the essence of the Holocaust, this is the movie I would recommend.I watched it because Jeanne Moreau was listed in the credits and she is worth the price of admission on any movie. She didn't disappoint.The Holocaust theme was played perfectly. It starts off with the lecturer sketching out the event for those never exposed to it, having her field a mix of serious and stupid questions, and introducing the sole Jewish girl in the class, Daisy, obviously assimilated.Her emotional attachment is with her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor Nana, played by Moreau, and the parents are never introduced; they would have just been clutter. Nana told her stories which conveyed the feeling of one having lived through the Holocaust and they affected Daisy psychologically to the point where she had nightmares. Why would she tell the girl such stories? Don't look for a rational explanation. She is a Holocaust survivor. If you think Nana should have had better sense relate this to The Pawnbroker starring Rod Steiger.Perhaps 50 per cent of Jews in the fourth and fifth generations in America, certainly of the upper classes, have no feeling of being different from anyone else, which is a healthy and normal state of affairs, but anti-Semitism is still out there, and Daisy was touched by it in the locker scene. This was the result of these students having had the Holocaust shoved down their throat by that lecture and that's what some got out of it.Her boyfriend Ethan did not dump her because she was Jewish, that is never stated explicitly, but she was too strange for him. It looked like this would be a case of opposites attract, but he was too shallow for her, and too immature. She was a prolific reader, an introvert, and possessed of a developing Jewish consciousness, which she got not from her parents, but it sprung on her from the relationship with her grandmother and the grandmother's tragic life. Daisy knew this influence had something to do with her losing Ethan and that's why she blurted out that she hated her grandmother at one point.The utter evil of the Holocaust is conveyed in the scene where the Nazi takes the two little girls. For what purpose, we need not even guess. Two among 1,500,000 million children who met horrible endings.Cinema has never really solved the problem of how to show life in the camps. The people were much too thin and too sick with a multitude of ailments and injuries, walking corpses, the milieu a babel of languages, and none of this can be portrayed by mere actors and actresses. We are left with the written word if you are looking for realism. Given the extreme restrictions anyone attempting a Holocaust theme faces who wishes to tell this story in a movie, this was a tour-de-force.

This movie actually ( in my opinion was not to bad) I just wish that there had been a better ending. Jude Law was brought to my attention for the first time in this movie. Id rate him a good B .Id give the movie a B-