Lately, there have been a lot of television shows and movies that explore the many stories that have taken place during WWII. Treasure is the latest film that deals with the ramifications of this war that so many people lost their lives in. Especially jews. This story is a little different from other ones, but it’s nonetheless very emotional in its own way. Julie Von Heinz shows the effects of all those lost souls on one man and his daughter.

Ruth Rothwax (Lena Dunham) a music journalist, and her father Edek Rothwax meet in Warsaw, Poland for an educational vacation to the country where he was born and lived before moving to the United States and settling in New York City. The trip is more than just a fun time for the father and daughter to reconnect. It’s to learn about what affected so much jewelry in Poland and many other countries. Ruth explores that in more than one way.

This father-daughter duo has some issues. She is educated and has an intellectual way of thinking and doing things. He, on the other hand, flies by the seat of his pants and uses his instincts and experiences to guide him. That is how he got a man named Stefan to be their driver for the entirety of the trip while they were traveling from place to place. He knows what he’s doing, but that rubs his daughter the wrong way as she’s made plans for them. Their relationship is the main crux of the story, though. They are distinctly different people with different ways of thinking, and one outweighs the other in the end.

There is an idea in this film about how to get respect, and the father uses money and tipping as his way to get respect from others. This rubs off on his daughter, who ends up helping her discover what her relatives went through in Krakow Poland during Auschwitz & Birkenau labor camps. She finds more than she bargained for, though, and her father was keeping a secret from her about his past and what her legacy is. The war affected a lot of people in a bad way, but this story shows how it affected Dunham and Fry’s character in a positive way.

There are some character traits that Dunham’s character had that annoyed me. She is a vegetarian and only eats seeds. I’m the first one who will say I love vegetables,  but the seed thing in the film threw me off a bit. This story is based on true events, so this is who this character is in real life. That being said, some of her annoying habits helped bring the story full circle in the end. She took some things from her father, but the journalist came through in the end. She had a doggedness to get what she wanted, and that proved to be good for the story overall in the end.

Fry and Dunham overall were pretty good despite both of their characters’ annoying habits. They became characters I wouldn’t have suspected based on their previous filmography. Subtitles for Fry and others from speaking Polish were a good addition to the movie. I always think it’s weird for people in foreign countries to be constantly speaking in English. Together, though, Fry and Dunham made a good father daughter duo in this film.

Treasure, as its title suggests, brings a hidden secret that I was not expecting. The crux of the story is the father daughter relationship and how they both have to overcome things from their pasts to repair their own relationship. This vacation, if you will to the homeland of the father and the sight of many atrocities during WWII, brought out a lot of emotion and pent up resentments from the past that have built up over time. They needed this as a way to cleanse those bad feelings. Heinz used a book that this story was based on to great effect. This was an emotional journey for me as a viewer of the film as much as it was for the characters in the story.

3 ½

Dan Skip Allen