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BY DANIEL BAIG | NOTE:
The Grey Zone opened Friday, October 18th in New York
City and Los Angeles. It will platform expand nationally
beginning in mid-November.
The Grey Zone was the hardest movie for me to sit through in my
entire life. I do not expect that I will ever again see a movie
as difficult to watch as this one was.
Let me immediately clarify the above by saying that I do not mean The
Grey Zone was hard to sit through because it was painfully bad, in
the way that Stealing Harvard, say, would be, or because it was
agonizingly long, boring, and incoherent in the way that the original
Solaris is.
Far from it. The Grey Zone is an excellent film, and clearly
one of the absolute highlights of this year, cinema-wise. It is
devastatingly powerful.
It is devastating, period.
And that is why it was so hard to watch. Indeed, there were
several points, especially in the first half, when I wanted to run out
of the theater; I literally had to force myself to remain in my seat.
And I was halfway to the point of nausea for just about the entire film.
I realize that for most people that hardly sounds like grounds for me
to then recommend this movie. But, on the contrary, I do.
More than that, I urge you to see it, and to take as many people
as you can with you when you do. To use one of those beyond-trite
expressions one sees in ads, If you see only one movie this year,
make it The Grey Zone. But not because it is a movie
you will enjoy more than any other you could possibly see in 2002.
No, indeed, enjoy is not a word which could even be remotely
appropriate for this film.
But it is the one movie you must go see as a moral obligation.
I mean that seriously. Seeing The Grey Zone will not be
a pleasant experience. It is something you, if youre like
me, will need to steel yourself to do. But not seeing it,
if you have an opportunity to, is the wrong thing to do, unless you are
very young, or very old.
What above all else makes The Grey Zone so hard to watch is the
fact that everything in it is more or less true. It is thus
more horrible to watch and contemplate than the goriest of horror movies.
The Grey Zones historical reality is its devastating
special effect, more effective, more chilling, more stomach-turning than
all the dismemberments in, say, Ghost Ship, hideous corpses in
The Ring, and mutilations in the Friday the 13th
movies, or anything like them, combined.
Even if you close your eyes and plug your ears, even if you flee from
the theater, you cannot escape from the ultimate horror: this
really happened.
The Grey Zone is set in 1944 in Birkenau, a.k.a. Auschwitz II,
the extermination camp of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp complex
where the Nazis systematically murdered anywhere between 1.3 million to
3 million people (3 million was the figure given by the camps SS
Kommandant at his trial after the war), the vast majority of them Jews
but also including Soviet prisoners of war, Romany (gypsies), political
prisoners, and homosexuals.
Most of the films protagonists are members of the Sonderkommando,
the squad of Jewish prisoners assigned the task of facilitating the immediate
execution of arriving trainloads of Jewish forced transportees in Birkenaus
disguised-as-showers gas chambers. It fell to these men to instruct
the fated people to take off their clothes and hang them up on racks (Remember
the number you put your things on, so you can retrieve them after the
shower!), then to herd them into the chamber and seal its door
behind them, and afterwards to drag their corpses out, cut off the womens
hair and remove gold teeth, rings, earrings, etc., and winch the bodies
up to the second floor where they would then be burned by the
Sonderkommando in the facilitys powerful ovens. (Or,
on days when the inflow of victims was too much for just the ovens, in
open trenches outside in which human body fat and gasoline were used to
flame the fires.)
It is hard to imagine a more ghastly job. The men selected to be
part of a Sonderkommando had a choice, of course. They could refuse,
whereupon they were shot on the spot. If they accepted the assignment,
they were granted extraordinary special privileges better food,
alcohol, more comfortable quarters, cigarettes, chairs to sit outside
in the sun in, etc. But their time to enjoy these perks
(while still, of course, knowing every waking moment that they were aiding
and abetting the murder and disappearance from the earth of innocent men,
women, and children, their own fellow people) was quite limited
after a month or two or three, never more than four, they too were executed,
and a new Sonderkommando would be formed.
REVOLT!
There were thirteen consecutive Sonderkommando
in all. The twelfth Sonderkommando shocked their SS captors by staging
a revolt in which they managed to destroy one of the camps crematoria
the term used for the buildings housing the gas chambers and ovens.
The gunpowder which blew up the building had been secretly supplied, at
enormous risk, and cost, by inmates of the womens camp who served
as slave laborers in Auschwitz III, the batch of munitions factories also
located in the complex. This is the center of the story which The
Grey Zone tells.
Much of the film is based on the memoir
of Auschwitz written by one of its survivors, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian
Jewish doctor (portrayed in The Grey Zone by Alan Corduner) who
was forced to assist the monstrous Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi head doctor
(more like a mad scientist) of the camp, who engaged in hideous experiments
on inmates, especially twins.
It was Dr. Nyiszli in his book (Auschwitz:
A Doctors Eyewitness Account) who recounted another event which
is dramatized in The Grey Zone: once, a young adolescent
girl was found to be still alive when the gas chamber was being emptied
of bodies. The Sonderkommando raced to the doctor, who managed to
revive the girl. (All this is accurately portrayed in the movie.
What happened next to the girl has been changed a little from what actually
happened by The Grey Zones writer and director Tim Blake
Nelson, who adapted it from his own stage play. Her ultimate fate
was substantially the same as what happens to her in the movie.
Nevertheless, I think portraying what really transpired exactly as it
did would have been a better choice, and just as powerful. Nelson,
however, I am guessing, preferred the slightly more dramatic ending his
version provides.)
In addition to Dr. Nyiszlis memoir,
The Grey Zone is also based on five diaries secretly kept by Sonderkommando
in order to let the future know what actually happened at Birkenau-Auschwitz.
They buried these testimonies (in jars, mostly) which were found years
and even decades after the war; thus, though they were all killed, their
voices bearing witness survived. Nelson created his storys
fictional characters from these real individuals.
Unquestionably, the film about the Holocaust
which has had the most impact, anywhere, is Schindlers List.
And its status as such is not likely to change anytime soon, if ever.
For any number of reasons, The Grey Zone will, unfortunately, never
come close to achieving the recognition that the earlier movie did.
Schindlers List had behind it the man who is possibly the
most successful director of all time. It had behind it an enormous
campaign of publicity and marketing and other studio effort which culminated
in its winning a slew of Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best
Picture.
Independently made on a budget a fraction
of what Steven Spielberg had to work with, The Grey Zone lacks
all those things, along with a John Williams score, poetic black and white
cinematography, and a little girl in a tinted red dress.
And it lacks Schindlers Lists
happy ending which is to say, it also lacks Schindlers
Lists moral cowardice.
Water does not come out of the shower
heads in The Grey Zone, in stark contrast to the infamous and unforgivable
cheap-scare/relief scene in the 1993 film.
Guns do not conveniently and
inexplicably jamb in The Grey Zone.
And, most obviously, The Grey Zone is in color. Because the
past didnt happen in black and white. The world was in color
in the 1940s, even as a state enthusiastically went about butchering millions
of innocent people, just as it is now.
In short, The Grey Zone is the anti-Schindlers List.
(It goes without saying that its also the anti-Life is
Beautiful; so is Schindlers List, for that matter.)
Which, only looking at its commercial prospects, is probably not a good
thing. But its also another way of saying that this is a
work which demonstrates a kind of integrity, in its commitment to the
truth, just about never seen in the world of non-documentary American
filmmaking.
The only feasible thing The Grey Zones filmmakers
could have done to even more scrupulously avoid any standard Hollywood
protective elements of comfort for the audience would have been to cast
all entirely unknown actors in its parts. As it is, being able at
any given moment to tell/remind oneself that, Thats David
Arquette, or Thats that guy from TV! [Daniel Benzali,
currently on The Agency] is to take one step further back
from the world on the screen and further into the world on this side of
it, one counteraction against the movies deliberate attempts to
dissolve the screen as much as possible and pull you into its events,
such as its use of handheld camera to place us in the muddle of things,
and its almost total eschewing of a musical score almost unheard
of in a contemporary American movie.
But when I asked Tim Blake Nelson about this, in a phone interview, he
told me that not using recognizable stars, such as, in addition
to Arquette and Benzali, Mira Sorvino, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, and
Natasha Lyonne, was never even a consideration. The film could never
have been made could never have been financed without
name actors.
So I used feasible loosely above, and mostly to differentiate
from something else which, could it have been done, would also have further
erased the screen. The movies actors leaving aside
even the male leads playing the Sonderkommando members, who were
given rations adequate for sustenance and extras, because they
are not 50 to 70 pounds underweight and lacking any body fat and traces
of muscle tone whatsoever, cannot even begin to resemble the walking skeletons
we know from photographs and real footage of the camps. But no director,
no matter how demanding, can ask his cast to fast to a point just short
of death ((and in so doing, of course, permanently damage their health)).
There are a few other things in The Grey Zone which momentarily
drew me out of it (which, in one sense, thus offered momentary respite
from its otherwise non-stop assault on the spirit):
The boxcars which transport the Jews (by the time of the films
events, those of Hungary, the final country to be cleansed
of its Jewish population) to the camp are nowhere near crammed enough
as they were historically; I couldnt help but find this glaringly
noticeable each time we are inside one of them. This is another
thing I asked Tim Blake Nelson about, and he said he agreed, and that
if he could do one thing over again it would be these scenes, but when
they were shooting them they seemed very crowded.
(Similarly, the gas chamber seemed a bit small; the actual Birkenau chamber
depicted was in reality able to handle 2000 people at a time yes,
three zeros , while the movies didnt seem as if it
could. But to be fair this is only something which occurred to me
long after I saw the film.)
Although refreshingly Nelson has his actors forego Jewish
accents they all sound like Americans, including British actor
Allan Corduner , which makes sense, since theyre all supposed
to be speaking their native language Hungarian to each other, he didnt
seem to think his language strategy completely through. Because
he has the actors playing Germans, including Keitel as the head Nazi in
charge, speak with German accents, which also makes sense, since they
really are meant to be speaking in German, not Hungarian, and this thus
differentiates them. But when he has the Jewish characters speak
to the Germans, he doesnt have them switch into German accents
as well, which they should, as they are then meant to be speaking German.
Not doing this leads to confusion, as in one scene in which Keitel and
a bunch of the Jewish characters are talking together in one room and
he all of a sudden yells at them to stop talking in Hungarian, as he cant
understand it but it wasnt really clear until this outburst
when/that they were speaking Hungarian to each other, since they
were also speaking German to him in the scene, and theres no differentiation.
But far more distracting than any of these relatively picayune matters
are the times when the dialogue all too amply betrays The Grey Zones
origins as a stage play of the 90s. My notes from the screening
have, in a number of places, TOO MAMET! written on them.
And I was planning to write in this review something along the lines of,
David Mamet has a lot to answer for. For better or worse,
his style has enormously shaped the language of recent American theater,
and sadly The Grey Zone is no exception. However,
when I brought this up with Tim Blake Nelson, he said he didnt
feel Mamet was an influence on him, but rather Harold Pinter was.
Well, I am unfortunately not as familiar with the British playwrights
work as I am with the Chicagoans, but I do know what is commonly
thought of as the Mamet-style of rhythmical back-and-forth dialogue when
I hear it, and I definitely heard it occasionally in The
Grey Zone.
And always to the cost of believability. For one thing, the tough
guy comeback style of talking seems really out of place here, especially
when it actually is engaged in by a Jew with a Nazi. Its
very hard to believe a Jew trying to stay alive another day (as
the Sonderkommando all were, which is why they made the bargain with the
devil that they did) would engage in talking back to an SS officer, as
happens once or twice in the movie.
Perhaps, though, the artificiality that settles over the film in these
brief moments when adapter/director Nelson indulges playwright Nelson
too much (and which had me momentarily having extremely unwelcome flashbacks
to the tedious Oleanna and Homicide) are in the end a plus,
as they allow the audience to briefly step back from the abyss.
And the actors do what they can in these moments to still fully inhabit
their characters, which they so brilliantly do all the rest of the time.
Although everyone is good and yes, David Arquette is fine, better
than fine, even the standouts are Sorvino, Corduner, and especially
Buscemi. Yes, really. This is one of the least cartoonish
parts hes had in a long time, and he uses it to demonstrate something
which can easily be forgotten when thinking about his parade of cinematic
goofballs and psychos, which is that he is an amazingly talented actor
when called upon to be so.
AN ENDING VERSUS NO ENDING
At the end of Schindlers List one cries. Its
a reaction which was old when Aristotle wrote about it in his theory of
dramatics. Tragic drama leads to emotional catharsis. And
theres always at the end a glimmer of that last-to-leave inhabitant
of Pandoras box, the start of the suns rise again after
the long night. Schindlers List had this in spades.
Its creators managed to extract, from what is as dark and bleak and ultimately
almost incomprehensible an obscene horror as has ever been seen on this
planet, an inspirational and absolutely bona fide true story of heroism,
inspiration, and salvation that actually had a true happy ending (and
in so doing, though with nary a single inaccuracy or falsehood, by focusing
on and popularizing this extraordinary exception to the vast rule, utterly
subvert the essential truths of the Holocaust, quite probably for decades
to come or longer).
I did not cry at the end of The Grey Zone, because I could not.
The comfort of tears is not available to those who give themselves over
to it. The only real reaction can be one of devastation. This
movie offers no catharsis, no release.
Worse, it has no heroes. It insists we identify with
pathetic, despicable men who compromised themselves morally because
they were human, and so, until the very end, valued one more breath of
life above all else. What the Nazis, in their perverse genius, did
to these men, and what they then in complicity also did to themselves,
was to destroy their souls and make them go on living long enough to know
it. And we in the audience are forced to acknowledge that we
too are complicit, cannot condemn them, cannot distance ourselves
from them, as we are men and women, as we are human, and so cannot say
we would not have done as they did.
One cannot cry at the end of The Grey Zone because there
is no resolution. Its story is not over, and probably never will
be.
Grade: A
A Must See
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