EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC sums up the emotional result when all the people that affect the life of Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon), a holocaust survivor at Drancy suddenly come together at her country home in Quebec.  Her son, Benjamin (Roy Depuis), grandson Timmy (Dakota Goyo) and husband David (Christopher Plummer) meet not only the man who saved her life, Jakob (Max Von Sydow) but the boy, Christopher (Gabriel Byrne) she never married.

Here comes the problem.  Every character has one.  Melanie is slightly mad.  So is Jakob.  David cannot live with Melanie’s past.  And so on.  Barzman’s film is basically a film about a dysfunctional family with a problem in the past.  The characters dwell too much into the past, digging deeper and deeper instead of finding a solution.  Worse still, since Melanie is quite demented, the audience should expect any.  The uncomfortable unresolved love triangle makes the point.  The film even begins with the narration:  Does God believe in me?  Expect then some major pessimism.  The question then is what ever happened to happy people in this film. 
The film could do well to trim down the number of characters.  Grandson Timmy is reduced merely to the dinner caller.  Son, David does nothing but cook and brood but hunk Roy Dupuis was probably hired to draw in the crowds.  Von Sydow is one of the greatest actors still alive today – but this role, though a major one does not do him justice.  Compare this role to his 5 minute performance as the father in the recent THE BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY that is guaranteed to tear you apart in tears.

Marzman is fond of using flashbacks back to the prison camps.  Unfortunately, these are clumsily employed especially with the use of other actors to depict the characters at a younger age.  They should serve the purpose of relaying the horrors of the camps.

The film gears towards the climatic dinner when all sit together for the purpose of all hell to break lose.  Do we need to watch all this?  In the film, Barzman and writer Jefferson Lewis offer two differing views.  One is to forget the past and move on with ones lives while the other is to learn from the past and not let past mistakes affect the future of mankind.  The obvious solution is a balance between the two but director Barzman sees no grey zone but only the black and white.  The end result of this emotional arithmetic is a big zero.