It’s incredible just how much of Lily Brett‘s wonderful novel Too Many Men director and co-screenwriter Julia von Heinz changed in her movie adaption. This included changing the title to Treasure, removing a key character and adding unnecessary elements to the story and its main protagonists.

To summarise briefly, the book and movie tell the story of fortysomething Jewess Ruth Rothwax who accompanies her elderly, but sprightly father Edek on a trip around Poland, where he grew up, to learn about his childhood and that of her late mother Rooshka before the war and the terrible events that followed, including being forced into the Lodz ghetto and then sent to Auschwitz.

The pair love each other but spend a large part of their time together in Poland annoyed at their travelling companion’s strange habits and obsessions. Edek complains that Ruth eats “like a bird” and needs to find a husband, while she worries about his unhealthy eating choices and propensity to run everywhere. While Edek has an overarching cheerfulness about his personality, despite everything he has endured, Ruther is frequently anxious and easily upset.

I watched the movie after reading the book and really wished I hadn’t.

Perversely, people who haven’t read the book will probably enjoy the movie more than those that have read it given there is less to be disappointed about.

Strangely, the author, Lily Brett, who based a large part of the novel on her own life, is a fan of the movie, unless she was just being nice or doing her bit to promote it.

“I do feel happy with it. I think it’s a beautiful movie,” she told The Australian Jewish News in July 2024

While the basics of the plot have been retained – in both the movie and the book, Ruth and Edek travel around Poland visiting old landmarks and dealing with each other’s eccentricities – so many elements that seem important to me and you would think to Brett (given so much of the novel is autobiographical) have been unnecessarily changed.

The literary Ruth (like the author Brett) is an Australian expat living in New York while her father Edek lives alone in Melbourne. In the book, he travels halfway around the world to meet his daughter to accompany her on her Poland trip.

In the movie, both Ruth and Edek are Americans living in New York. Their Australianness is completely removed despite it being the place where Lily Brett’s parents moved to after the war and where they made a new life.

In the novel, Ruth is a successful businesswoman who runs a professional writing service in Manhattan. This comes up frequently in the novel as she contemplates how she should compose various letters, whilst taking calls from her assistant Max at all hours of the night. In the movie, Ruth is simply a journalist eking out a living. In the book, Ruth has endless amounts of money, in the movie she is not quite so wealthy.

In the novel, food is such an important element: Edek stacks his plate high at breakfast buffets, he eat Perogi and Polish pastries and they dine out an awful “Jewish-themed” restaurant in Krakow. In the movie virtually none of this is retained. Instead, Ruth travels around Poland with a suitcase full of muesli-like ingredients which she brings to every meal. In the book, she merely chooses the healthiest options from the buffet.

Heinz also embellishes Ruth’s character with unnecessary eccentricities: she has a penchant for privately guzzling chocolate, is a secret smoker and has an odd need to self-mutilate. None of these behaviours are in the book.

I realise novels have to be condensed into a relatively short period time, but why change important details like this? It removes a lot of authenticity from the film, which is not assisted by the leaden and plodding acting of Lena Dunham who is sadly badly miscast in the film. Stephen Fry is surprisingly good as Edek.

Another major disappointment was the omissions of a character that appears to Ruth whilst she is in Poland. It’s a brilliant piece of magical realism – Ruth hears the voice of a famous old Nazi stuck in purgatory. She then begins conversing with him (in her head) whilst walking the streets of Warsaw and Lodz. She naturally despises him, whilst he tries to justify his actions as merely following orders. Why this aspect of the novel was left out of the film leaves me gobsmacked.

There are some elements of the book the movie does well mostly visual: the grainy, grey and depressing depiction of Poland in the early 1990s is just as I imagined it in the book as are the gaudy interiors of hotels, apartments and airports.

But pivotal moments in the novel (which depict Brett’s own travels with her father) such as the visit to Auschwitz, which should have been given great prominence in the movie are reduced to a few short scenes with very little emotional power. And there is virtually no explanation given to the great climax of the novel: the dig in the backyard of Edek’s childhood apartment block to find a buried memento.

I was incredibly moved by Brett’s wonderful autobiographical novel, but deeply disappointed by the film adaption. Perhaps it should never have been made.