directed by Matthew E. Rosen
written by Janice Y. Perez and Dean Rosen
A few years before German businessman and Nazi party member Oskar Schindler grew a conscience and decided to save several hundred Jews from sure death in the dark days of World War II, the dying president of the Philippine Commonwealth, Manuel L. Quezon, defied his colonial masters in the United States of America to do the unthinkable; he opened the Philippines to over a thousand Jews living in Germany and Austria who would otherwise have been rounded up and placed in Nazi death camps. Quezon's Game, directed by Matthew E. Rosen, is the dramatization of this extraordinary story.
Veteran actor Raymond Bagatsing essays the role of the late President Quezon. Bagatsing, whom I first saw as Stanley Kowalski in a local staging of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire over twenty-three years ago, brings all of the craft he had then (and everything he's picked up along the way since then), to what is arguably the role of a lifetime. He does his level best to portray a President knowing he's on the brink of death and desperate to seal his own legacy as the one person who would do the right thing when no one else would. Judging by Quezon's old archival footage, Bagatsing apparently takes real effort to capture Quezon's speech inflections as Daniel Day Lewis tried to recreate what historians believed to be Abraham Lincoln's actual voice in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, but his performance goes well beyond mere mimicry as he strives to embody both Quezon's despair and yet his unflinching resolve in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He receives able support from veteran Filipino actors Rachel Alejandro who plays his devoted wife Aurora and Audie Gemora who plays Quezon's Vice President, Sergio Osmena, in a nicely-nuanced turn that captures the difficulty of balancing interests that all politicians have to make.
Far more uneven, unfortunately, are the key supporting roles played by various Caucasian actors, including, most prominently, Billy Ray Gallion (of Lost fame) as Alex Frieder, a prominent American Jew who first brings the attention of the imminent need to evacuate Jews to Quezon's attention, James Paoleli as High Commissioner to the Philippines Paul McNutt, and David Bianco as then Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower. Of the three of them, Gallion is the most consistent, followed by Bianco and finally Paoleli. It feels halting at times; there are scenes in which this ensemble recites their lines as if their acting in a 1930s movie as opposed to a movie set in the 1930s and even though the script itself rarely falters (and I will discuss that later), the actors often do. Due to a sparse IMDB page, I can't remember the names of the other actors who played Americans, (with the exception of stage veteran Miguel Faustmann who played General Douglas MacArthur and nonetheless managed to chew the scenery in the fleeting moments he was onscreen), but it's just as well because I don't have flattering things to say about any of them, such as the actor who plays the bigoted American official named Cartwright, who plays the part a bit too broadly, or the guy who plays Alex Frieder's brother Herb. Also the less said about the actor who plays a Nazi, the better, but suffice it to say they couldn't have done any worse had they replaced him with a cartoon character. There are a few other infuriating bit actors, like the actress who plays the slinky proprietress of a hotel who also doubles as a lounge singer, but their exposure is mercifully short.
It's actually a shame that the acting falters, especially when it comes to the smaller but nonetheless pivotal roles, because otherwise the script, written by Dean Rosen and Janice Y. Perez, is incredibly tight, with dialogue that never feels overwrought or melodramatic, and quite effectively ratchets up the urgency of the situation with nothing more than words and a few foreboding musical notes. It's fortunate that the lead actors, particularly Bagatsing, Gallion and Bianco, hold the line, even when Paoleli fumbles ever so slightly. Personally, I most enjoyed the scenes between Bagatsing and Gemora, who spoke in a mix of English and Tagalog, as it really seemed like the sort of dialogue in which statesmen would engage, and it's made all the better for the fact that both the script and Gemora portray Osmena as a conflicted man, one who wants to do the right thing in his heart but who also tries to be realistic about what he can achieve. One flaw of the script, actually, is how it tends to lionize Quezon, papering over what are no doubt his many flaws as both a statesman and a human being, even as it makes oblique reference to them, but it's an omission I can forgive, given the story imperatives.
One thing I can't forgive, however, is the godawful music score, also composed by Dean Rosen, which is equal parts anachronistic (with what sounds like an abundance of synthesized music), and overbearing as it plays long and loud in scenes that don't really require it. Also, I just didn't really think it was very good. I get that this was a low-budget film, and it shows on many, many occasions, and that there wasn't any money to hire a 100-piece orchestra or something like that, but even though I'm not a composer or a musician, I respectfully suggest that for a movie like this, a handful of musicians, led by a soloist on piano, violin or even guitar would have been far more effective than this mess of a music score. I mean, I'm almost certain that the one piece of music people remember more than any other from the similarly-themed Schindler's List was Itzhak Perlman's superlative violin solo playing the film's mournful theme. I'm fairly shocked this isn't a lesson the filmmakers took to heart when making this.
So, as much as I liked this movie's ultimate message, its script and the performances by its main players, I still couldn't quite come to terms with how rough around the edges it felt. Compared to the two period films released by Jerrold Tarog over the last few years, namely the now iconic Heneral Luna and the lesser, but nonetheless highly-competent Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral, Quezon's Game has moments in which it feels downright amateurish in its execution. While I imagine that budget constraints might have played some part in compromising the quality of the finished product, I do feel there's something missing from Rosen's craft regardless of how much or how little money the filmmakers had in their coffers for this film.
Still, I can't deny that he extracted some extraordinary performances from his main actors which basically transcend many, if not most of this film's other artistic shortcomings. That, and the script, really make this movie worth watching. There may be some utterances of harsh language here and there, but this film is still worth showing to Filipino students and other young people, if only to show them the kind of thing that true statesmen are capable of doing.
7.5/10
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