‘Bau: Artist at War’ Review: Emile Hirsch Can’t Rescue a Cliché-Ridden Biopic

Joseph Bau’s life and work deserved a film very different from this one. The artist, cartoonist, and Holocaust survivor—whose story was partly told in Schindler’s List—undoubtedly lived a cinematic life. He survived the Holocaust, carried on a love story inside a concentration camp with his wife Rebecca, and later went on to play various, more controversial roles in Israel. But this is not the film Bau deserves. He deserves something more careful, subtle, intelligent, and truthful. Bau: Artist at War is a mediocre sketch, overloaded with clichés, about his life during—and briefly after—World War II.

Played by Emile Hirsch, Joseph Bau is portrayed—unlike most figures in this kind of story—as lighthearted, optimistic, charming, and genuinely funny: a caricaturist who lived to draw in notebooks and on scraps of paper. Director Sean McNamara—a prolific filmmaker whose résumé leans heavily toward family entertainment and includes the recent biopic Reagan—opens the film in the 1970s, with Bau living in Israel. There, he works as an illustrator and animator and, somewhat improbably, as a document forger for the intelligence agency Mossad, creating fake passports for spies like Eli Cohen and for operatives involved in the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

At this point, Bau is visited by a young Austrian lawyer (Josh Zuckerman), who wants to persuade him to testify in Vienna against a former Nazi official, Franz Gruen (Yan Tual). Bau initially refuses, but gradually opens up, recounting his story, which begins when he and his family were deported from the Krakow ghetto to the concentration camp of Plaszow. The film focuses on the brutality he endured there, his romance with Rebecca Tennenbaum (Inbar Lavi), whom he met in the camp, and his attempts to survive an increasingly dangerous situation. Much of this storyline intersects with the narrative of Spielberg’s classic, as the now-mythic list compiled by businessman Oskar Schindler (played here by Edward Foy) crosses paths with Bau’s life.

Shot in a rudimentary fashion, largely on soundstages with painted or generative-AI backdrops, weighed down by exaggerated accents (even by the standards of the genre), a script full of contrivances and cardboard dialogue, bombastic music, and performances that—Hirsch aside—rarely rise above the basic, Bau: Artist at War does little to honor its subject. Across its 130-minute running time, one can glimpse the outline of a far stronger biopic struggling to emerge. McNamara, however, misses nearly every opportunity. Instead, he relies on the most familiar screenwriting tricks, delivering a film that feels crudely manipulative.

Perhaps the only somewhat distinctive element stems from something intrinsic to Bau himself: his optimism and innate warmth. Hirsch conveys this during the earlier sections, but the performance turns heavy and mournful —beneath layers of ill-advised makeup— in the later Tel Aviv scenes. Predictably, the concentration camp sequences are shot in black and white, while the postwar material unfolds in color. Yet little meaningfully changes between the two halves. Everything feels forced, arbitrary, second-rate.

So much so that McNamara achieves something remarkably difficult: he makes a Holocaust story that fails to generate any genuine emotion. Even overtly manipulative films like Life Is Beautiful managed to move audiences. Whatever its flaws, Roberto Benigni’s film looks like a masterpiece next to this flat, painfully mediocre Bau: Artist at War.