I Am David
By Peter T. Chattaway | posted 12/03/2004
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If you have seen The Passion of The Christ, you may feel a strange sense of deja vu while watching I Am David. Although the film, based on the 1963 novel by Anne Holm, is mainly about a boy who treks across Europe after escaping from a Communist labor camp in the years following World War II, the film also includes several flashbacks and dream sequences that include Jim Caviezel and Hristo Shopov. Caviezel (Passion's Jesus) plays Johannes, a fellow prisoner who befriends and stands up for the lad, while Shopov (Passion's Pontius Pilate) plays the commander, known only as "The Man," whose brutality just may hide a conflicted conscience.
Ben-Tibber,-a-relative-newcomer
Seeing these two actors stare into each other's eyes once again, and in roles so similar to the parts they played in that biblical flick, one is tempted to think that I Am David's producers—including Walden Media, the company behind the upcoming Narnia movie—were trying to cash in on Mel Gibson's success when they greenlit this project. But in fact, the film was finished and shown at the Cannes Film Festival as far back as May 2003, when The Passion was still being filmed and its box-office prospects were anybody's guess.
So, while the studio may have sat on the film for so long partly to exploit this coincidence of casting, I Am David does deserve to be seen on its own terms—or, at least, as an adaptation of the book. Those who come to the film blind will find a simple and harmless tale of one boy's first taste of freedom, albeit a tale that lacks the gravitas and historical resonance of, say, Walt Disney's Night Crossing and similar films that were made back when the Cold War was still a reality. But the first thing that will strike those who have read the book is how different the film is, in intent and feel, from its source material.
David finds himself on quite the adventure after his prison escape
The novel is written in a highly subjective style that sees the world exclusively through David's eyes; it notices what a child would notice, and no more. Even the people who run the concentration camp are referred to merely as "they" or "them"; at his age, David isn't particularly concerned with political labels, and the sparse vocabulary heightens the distance that David tries to put between himself and the authorities, which in turn influences the extreme caution he practices around other adults after he has fled the camp.
Film, however, is a more objective medium—instead of looking at the world through David's eyes, we can observe it for ourselves—and writer-director Paul Feig (creator of TV's Freaks and Geeks) makes some details more concrete, while making others more cryptic. The story now begins explicitly in Bulgaria in 1952, but the identity of the man who engineers David's escape—from giving him the exact timing of the guards' shifts to planting a bundle of necessities in the forest that encircles the camp—is hidden from the viewer, even though it is made plain in the novel from the beginning. And this, in turn, tends to distance us even more from David and his thought processes.
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