Focus (2001) on Netflix
In wartime Brooklyn, Lawrence Newman holds a desk job and lives with his mother. His new eyeglasses make neighbors say he looks Jewish, and the antisemitism around him turns his way.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.7/103,295 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes56%
Trailer
Plot summary
The last months of World War II find Lawrence Newman working as a personnel manager in Brooklyn and living with his mother. Fred, the neighbor next door, is friendly, but Fred also belongs to the Union Crusaders, a group that blames Jews for the war, and the block has grown tense since Finkelstein, a Jewish storekeeper, arrived. When Gertrude Hart comes to Lawrence's office looking for a job, he sends her away, afraid for his own position. He buys a new pair of glasses, and people tell him they make him look Jewish. Before long he is the one the neighborhood's hostility lands on. His employer demotes him with no explanation, and he quits. Gertrude, now a secretary at a Jewish-owned business, runs into him, and after he apologizes she gets him work there.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Focus (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- William H. Macy hesitated to play Lawrence Newman in Focus, fearing that as an "uber-Lutheran" he might offend people by playing a victim of antisemitism and seem to trivialize the subject; he took the part only after consulting his mentor David Mamet.
- Focus was personally financed by Michael Bloomberg, a friend of director Neal Slavin's who was then a candidate for mayor of New York City; Bloomberg read the script in a day and stayed involved throughout, Slavin said.
- Focus was shot in Toronto, where the producers built a simulacrum of 1940s Brooklyn; Slavin wanted a "Mary Poppins"-like world so stylized that the prettiness hides a dark underbelly.
