Focus

Lawrence Newman is a personnel manager at a Brooklyn firm, and on the day he starts wearing glasses his neighbourhood begins to look at him differently. His face has not changed, his name has not changed, but the neighbours now take him for a Jew. The prejudice he spent years quietly going along with turns on him: he loses his job, his windows are broken, and he and his wife end up standing next to the Jewish shopkeeper on the corner. Neal Slavin's film is adapted from the novel Arthur Miller wrote in 1945. The point is not a case of mistaken identity but the fact that racism depends on what a crowd wants to see rather than on who anyone actually is. William H. Macy is neither hero nor victim, just a man who worked it out late. Laura Dern plays his wife, and David Paymer the shopkeeper who refuses to leave the street.