Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I was enchanted (or at least entranced) by Bohumil Hrabal picaresque novel I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále),* as much earlier I was by Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel). Despite the best efforts of talented film-makers — Völker Schlöndorff  for Drum and Jirí Menzel* for Served — the movie adaptations disappointed me.

As Oskar, the child who refused to grow up in Nazi Danzig (Gdansk)  in Drum looked like how I imagined him. In Served, Oldrich Kaiser does not look like how I imagined the more simple-minded waiter Jan Díte who wanted to get rich and to get laid (and accomplished both ambitions multiple times). The fault is probably mine, but Kaiser looks more stupid than innocent to me. ("Dite" means child in Czech, though unlike Oskar who refused to grow up physically,  Jan is a case of unconscious moral failure to take responsibility for his deeds.)

"My whole life, I aspired solely to become a millionaire,"  Jan tells us (ca. the late 1960s after 15 years in prison). He got his start (before WWII in independent Czechoslovakia) purporting not to have change for railroad passengers to whom he sold sausages on a train station platform. He went on to become the headwaiter at the most prestigious restaurant in Prague, and eventually to own a spa that provided female bedmates for the guests along with having a just-so restaurant. Through maneuvers far to complicated to relate, Jan came to own the spa at the end of the war when the Germans left. But not for long, when the communist state seized it and imprisoned him as a capitalist. (One irony is that he was not punished for being a collaborationist: he had married a Hitler-worshipping German woman Lise (Julia Jentsch) and did very well during the Nazi occupation.)

After which he was sent to a nearly deserted village from which the German population had been deported and works on renovating a house and puzzling over his career. The Nazis and the communists and the Czech nationalists were/are all incomprehensible to him, but from the mid-1930s to the late-1940s Jan managed to fall up. His greed is so abstract that it does not seem like a character flaw. But for all his insouciant appearance, he schemes and treats his mentors and patrons badly.

I could not find any fault with Jaromír Sofr's cinematography of the varied locales on Jan's odyssey. And Ivan Barnev is more satisfying as the adolescent Jan than Oldrich Kaiser.

For showing someone who was not just apolitical but clueless in collaborating with the Nazis, I would recommend the adaptation of Michel Tournier's The Ogre with a surprisingly guileless John Malkovich eventually recognizing The Horror. Arthur Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man is funnier along similar lines of retrospection of times the narrator did not and does not understand. (And Faye Dunaway in that is as much a caricature as the love goddesses in "Served.")

It is very difficult in the objective medium of cinema to carry over the voice of novels with distinctive voices and to maintain the blurred or skewed way a character perceives what he or she recollects. Maybe if I had read Little Big Man, I would view the screen adaptation in a less favorable light, though I  think that  Jan Dite did more things that are reprehensible than Jack Crab, who was more an observer than an agent.

BTW, the only DVD bonus features are a dozen trailers, including one for this movie. And Jan didn't serve any English monarch. He was given a mdeal by Haile Selassie (the title should have been  "I Served the Lion of Judah"; it was his mentor, Mr. Skrivanek, who once served the kind of England).

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* I discussed the book (not in the epinions database) at www.associatedcontent.com/article/1348231/a_harrowing_tale_of_changing_fortunes.html?cat=38


+ Jirí Menzel, who directed Hrabel's "Closely Watched Train" (which won a best foreign-language film Oscar) was tightly censored after Soviet tanks crushed "the Prague Spring" Release of "Larks on a String", also based on a Hrabel novel, which Menzel had completed before the Soviet crackdown, was blocked until 1990, after the breakup of the Soviet empire.

©2009, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD