Sunshine is a solid,
beautiful family epic

By Amy Diaz
Sunshine (Rated R)

Not the sunny side of the street.

Ralph Fiennes lives through decades of stormy weather in Sunshine, an epic following five generations of a Jewish Hungarian family.

Fiennes plays a grandfather, Ignatz; a father, Adam, and a son, Ivan, in the Sonnenschein family (which means Sunshine in German). The family story begins when elder Sonnenschein moves to Budapest and begins bottling his father's liquor recipe Taste of Sunshine. He has two sons - Ignatz and Gustav. The movie follows Ignatz's generation, then his son's and then his grandson's as the family - which has some wealth - tries to find a place in an Austro-Hungarian society that still looks down on them for their Jewish heritage. The story is not a black and white treatise on anti-Semitism. It's more about the pain of never really fitting in, in your own country. Each measure of success the family attains is at the price of some part of identity and is usually not enough to protect them from the current political winds. The men wrestle with imperialism, Nazism and Communism and are always the worse for it because no amount of national loyalty can obscure their ethnicity.

As unlucky as the Sonnenschein men are at life, they are even unluckier at love. One man falls for his cousin, one has an affair with his brother's wife and another has an affair with the wife of an important Communist official. Their romantic failures spring from their general uneasiness with their place in the world - which shows how personal the effects of politics can become.

In addition to being an engaging look at the last century of Eastern European history, this is a great family story. The family has its ups and downs, but when combined with its precarious position in the greater Hungarian society the family truly begins to think of itself as cursed. When you see a son repeat the mistakes of his father, you can begin to believe that there might be a curse after all.

This movie also looks at prejudice and how it can turn up anywhere. I know that sounds very after-school-special but this is not really about the obvious kinds of prejudice. It's more about the little individual prejudices, including a sort of self-disdain, that can lead to calamity.

Sunshine is a heavy film, both in subject matter and in length. I know it's hot, and summer isn't usually the time for serious films, but if you can stand to be thinky for three hours, Sunshine offers a solid, beautiful family epic.