‘Franz’ Review: Agnieszka Holland’s Kafka Biopic Never Stands Still, but Never Finds Its Stride

As biopic subjects go, Franz Kafka is resistant to standard-issue treatment on a number of levels — beginning with the fact that his life, short and largely uncelebrated in its time, wasn’t especially remarkable. A humble civil servant from a middle-class Czech Jewish family in Prague, he published very little of his influential literary oeuvre prior to his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40; while he was alive, his existence resembled that of many a frustrated, moonlighting writer stuck in an uninspiring day job. There’s also the matter of spiritual fidelity to the man and his work: For an artist associated with nightmarishly distorted reality and absurdism, a linear, glossily prestigious Wikimovie would amount to a kind of betrayal.

That’s not a charge you can level at veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland. Her roving, restlessly shape-shifting portrait “Franz” certainly honors Kafka’s iconoclasm, if not really…