In 1940, Thomas Wolfe wrote a book titled You Can’t Go Home Again, which explores the difficulties of revisiting our past.  To put a finer point on the tome’s theme, we build up aspects of our memories to the point that they can never live up to our expectations.  This is not to suggest that all mental keepsakes are a bad idea.  It is what we make of them that counts.  Some obsess over them, others try to forget, but God should always be at the center, which is proper.  These ideas are explored in today’s film, Treasure, which lands in the right place but without any kind of divine revelation.  It is a difficult watch, but there is a depth of feeling in it that I will always appreciate.

We first meet Ruth Rothwax in Treasure feeling anxious for the arrival of her father, Edek Rothwax (Stephen Fry), at the Warsaw, Poland, international airport.  It is 1991 and communism has recently ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Because their family had fled Europe after World War II, this is their first opportunity to return to the land of Edek’s birth.  Initially, the journalist Ruth had wanted to do the trip alone.  A year previously, her mom had died, and dad did not seem inclined to go, wondering why she would be interested in seeing any of it.  She also has misgivings about his blasé attitude, and the fact that he is still hung up on her ex-husband, Garth (not pictured).  Ruth’s foreboding appears correct when it takes Edek extra time to emerge from customs.  She has a budgeted, carefully plan itinerary for them to stick to, involving taking trains to get where they are going.  However, he hesitates before boarding.  As is later revealed, he is a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and such means of transportation are not to his liking.  Instead, Edek makes friends with Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a local, English speaking taxi driver who becomes their de facto chauffeur during the Rothwax’s trip.  Edek’s painful memories of his time in this country come out often.  When Ruth wants to see a portion of the wall that surrounded the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, he takes them to a random area on the city’s outskirts.  To him, a wall is a wall.  The place Ruth really wants to go is Lodz, which is Edek’s home town.  She wants to see where her parents met and grew up, but he would rather show her the Chopin museum.  When they finally get to their destination, they soon find the factory that their family once operated, and the building in which they lived.  Edek is content with just seeing it from the outside, but Ruth wants to go inside.  Once there, he watches uncomfortably as she knocks on the door and buys her way into the apartment.  As they are invited for tea, he notices items around the house that once belonged to his family.  There is the couch in the living, a silver dish, and the porcelain with which the beverages are served, all having been left behind when the Rothwaxes were forced to leave in 1941.  That is when the next family moved in by their own admission, which, for Ruth, makes these things theirs.  Edek is less inclined to bother the residents, and the experience of being so close to these physical reminders of the past has him losing interest in going with her to Auschwitz, which is supposed to happen the following day.  Not wanting to let the dishes go, instead of the planned excursion, she takes the hotel’s bellboy, Tadeusz (Tomasz Wlosok), to act as interpreter as she goes back to her father’s old home.  There, she negotiates to purchase the sundries that once belonged to her family, and is gifted her grandfather’s coat with the initials still sewn into the inside.  Edek is shocked by Ruth’s actions, and he remains angry with her to the point that she is not able to give him the coat.  Yet, because he felt that she had done something dangerous, he does relent and decide to go with her to the concentration camp.  Upon getting to the site, she has to sheepishly apologize for hiring a guide when she is visiting with a former inmate.  He waves off her consternation, and shows them the actual spot from which he had debarked from the train and been separated from his family, as well as the barracks in which he slept.  It is an upsetting experience for everyone involved, and Edek takes comfort in the arms of Zofia (Iwona Bielska) one of a pair of elderly women who have been staying at the same lodgings as the Rothwaxes for the past few days.  Ruth discovers this when the building’s fire alarm goes off and she spots her father and Zofia together in bathrobes.  Feeling betrayed, Ruth decides she is going to depart early to return to New York and leave Edek to live his fantasy life in Poland.  As she is about to exit, she finally gives him his dad’s coat.  He clutches the winter clothing and weeps while she arranges for a ride to the airport with Stefan.  Edek prevents Ruth from going and instead takes her back to their family’s building.  Once there, with some help from Tadeusz, they dig up a box that Edek and his father had hidden before being taken to Auschwitz.  Inside a box are the deeds to the building in which they lived and the factory.  What interests Ruth more are the pictures of relations she had never known, all people who had died at the hands of Nazis.  The revelation explains why he has been acting so strange throughout their travels, and helps heal and renew the relationship between dad and daughter.

The whole point of the dad-daughter Poland trek in Treasure, at least for the latter half of that duo, is to reconnect with the past.  The first half wants nothing to do with it and is more concerned with her being divorced without any children.  Edek’s comments to Ruth are not Christ-like, and they are born of his desire to always be looking ahead.  On the one hand, you cannot blame him for this attitude.  He survived the horrors of the Holocaust, a historical event familiar to most and yet we still allow similar things to happen today.  In some ways, you can sense Philippians 3:13 in Edek, which admonishes us to “[forget] what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead. . . .”  The problem is that Edek has not received any healing from his terrible experiences during World War II.  Trying to put it out of mind, including by moving to a different continent, is not a good coping strategy.  Prayer is always going to be the answer, consistent and deep.  There are other methods that can help, and we see them on display here.  One can make the argument that what we are witnessing in Edek’s case is a form of exposure therapy.  This is something the Church supports, in the right settings, and She acknowledges that it can be a powerful tool.  The key moment is when he gets his father’s coat.  It allows him to do something that he had not done in fifty years: show emotion.  Jesus showed plenty of emotion during his time on Earth, otherwise I doubt He would have been able to establish Christianity.  It is about being vulnerable to letting the things of the world pierce your heart.  One might not think this is advisable, but he has Ruth.  Love completes the process and allows us to bear life’s troubles easier.

Then again, Treasure is not an easy movie to watch.  The interactions between Edek and Ruth are awkward early on, and there is some brief nudity.  At the same time, it can be a fulfilling film to watch if you are interested in stories of reclaimed identity.