Tickling Leo

The troubled voice that dominates “Tickling Leo” belongs to Warren Pikler (Lawrence Pressman), an aged Hungarian Jewish poet who lives alone on wooded property in the Catskills. Increasingly beset by frightening flashbacks to his childhood during World War II, Warren is a Lear-like figure, slipping in and out of paranoid dementia, who has taken to wandering naked around his property.

Although strongly acted and deeply felt, writer-director Jeremy Davidson's arcanely titled "Tickling Leo" is too theatrically conceived and diffusely told to satisfy its lofty aspirations. Davidson would have been better off choosing one of his script's bursting story strands and telling it well, rather than mashing them all together into this unwieldy, often grandiose stew.