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Elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor Warren Pikler (Lawrence Pressman) lives by himself in a demented state in a decaying house by a lake at an abandoned Catskills resort. He is haunted by an incident in the past involving his father, Emil (Eli Wallach), and it is too much for him to handle. He stalks around his house naked, soils himself, and has tortured flashbacks. One day, his son Zak (Daniel Sauli), a would-be short story writer, receives a phone call from boisterous Uncle Robert (Ronald Guttman in an energetic performance) to come visit Warren over the Yom Kippur holidays, telling Zak his father is not doing too well. With that Zak and his pregnant girlfriend Delphina (Annie Parisse) travel to the Catskills for what will turn out to be a weekend of family anger, tub-thumping, and revelations.
Davidson based Tickling Leo on the World War II Kasztner Affair, in which Rudolph Kasznter, the leader of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Hungary during World War II, negotiated with Adolph Eichmann to ransom Jewish lives in return for a number of concessions, including keeping the truth about Auschwitz from the Jewish ghettos so Eichmann could avoid another Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Now there's a story to tell. But Davidson wastes these factual events, making them filler for a turgid and cracked family drama.
Tickling Leo is shot in extreme low budget on murky HD video with available light -- and it looks it. That would be fine if the script made any sense and didn't leave the actors high and dry, working overtime to connect. Tickling Leo is less an integrated film project than a collection of actors' audition tapes, high-energy exercises that seem impressive individually but look nothing short of ridiculous when compiled together in a film. Warren descends into dementia in one scene but is then lucid enough to have a heart to heart with Delphina and even grab a train from the Catskills to Harlem in the next. Robert is a loud, vibrant Zorba the Hungarian in one scene; in the next he becomes Simon Legree, pissed off because Delphina is late to the Yom Kippur dinner.
And it also doesn't help when some of the dialogue sounds like rejected one-liners from B-movie film noir -- 'He kills your mother and you bow to him all of your life'; 'I've had the Mossad and the CIA tracking after me for 50 years'; and the Mitchum-inspired, 'I don't want to sleep; I'll sleep when I'm dead.'
It all leads up to 95-year old Eli Wallach, sitting in a wheelchair, garbed in a Brooklyn Dodgers shirt in a Manhattan nursing home. Wallach wraps up the story with a very unsurprising revelation -- but at that point I would have rather been back in the living room, watching the Yankees game.
Coochie coochie coo!
