The Memory Thief

Gil Kofman's unsettling drama finds Lukas (Mark Webber), a twentysomething Los Angeles tollbooth operator, facing a life-altering chain of events when a motorist pays the toll with a copy of Mein Kampf. Another driver, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor, notices Hitler's book in Lukas' booth, mistakes him for a neo-Nazi, and then provides him with a videotaped record of recollections of the Holocaust. The poignancy of the video spurs Lukas into a new passion: producing oral histories of survivors. However, he goes overboard in his effort, to the point of identifying himself as a Jew—complete with a prayer shawl, a mezuzah for his tollbooth, and the pursuit of an attractive Jewish medical student (Rachel Miner). A film that uses a young man's fixation with World War II horrors for the foundation of a psychological dissection of acute obsessive behavior might seem to be in somewhat poor taste, but Webber's performance is both mature and subtle, effectively offering up a portrait of a lost soul struggling to fill the emptiness in his life. Recommended. (P. Hall)