Now I have to shift tone to the polar opposite of working for peace and justice. The Grey Zone is a horribly depressing -- and not particularly well done -- movie that graphically and nauseatingly depicts the inhuman suffering of the Holocaust. The hook here is that it's about one of Auschwitz's Sonderkommando, squads of Jewish prisoners who herd other Jews into the gas chambers (chillingly telling them to remember the number of the hook on which they hang their clothes so they can find them after the "shower"), then collect the naked corpses, burn them in the crematoria, and shovel the ashes. What they get from this pact with the devil is a few more days of life (four more weeks, tops) and some luxury items -- including the jewelry they take from the people they lead into the gas chambers.
This is a very difficult movie to watch, and despite the importance of its story, I wouldn't recommend it. Although it uses light and shadow effectively and creates a dark, creepy atmosphere, it isn't artistically strong or innovative enough to make it worth suffering through the horrifying images. Especially in the wake of Sept. 11, there are some things that I just don't need to see any more, and horrible suffering, unimaginable hatred and cruelty, and stacks of corpses are high on that list. I don't know why anyone would want to put themselves through that. You know what? I know about the Holocaust. I've seen the photos, the newsreel clips, the stories. I realize how unspeakable it was, and I just can't see any more of it.
As impossible as it is to fathom the horrors of the Holocaust and the evil of the men who planned and executed such a ghastly idea, it's even more difficult to understand what these Sonderkommando were thinking -- and how they lived with themselves. The film does little to illuminate their choices. One among them commits suicide -- but only after he's shoved his entire family into the ovens. What, somehow the hundreds of other corpses didn't get to him too much? The squad is planning an uprising, but even they know that they can't escape and the best they can hope for is to knock out one or two of the crematoria -- a dent the Nazis would barely feel. (And let's not forget the crematoria only dispose of the corpses; the mass murder would continue apace.)
Writer/director Tim Blake Nelson also wrote the play on which the movie is based, and it retains a very static, stagy feel -- too many scenes of people standing still, reciting lines at each other, with the distinctive enunciation and repetition of Aaron Sorkin's (The West Wing) writing (or a bleached David Mamet's). And, honestly, any emotion you feel comes from history and the setting -- any movie about the Holocaust (perhaps Life Is Beautiful excepted) is going to be harrowing and wrenching by its very subject matter. Nelson doesn't do anything artistically to earn your emotional reaction. His script is flat and his actors mere outlines of characters.
The, ah, unusual cast -- David Arquette, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne -- doesn't create the hideous car wreck one might expect, but they don't show any aptitude for this kind of heavy lifting, and they don't do the movie any favors (not that it does anything to help them, either). Steve Buscemi is the only actor who makes an impression (and half of that comes from his slick wardrobe and weaselly countenance) as a crafty Pole working with the Hungarian heroes [oddly, the actors playing the Hungarians -- and the Poles, for that matter -- speak in their normal accents, while the Nazis have the typical, evil, psychotic-Colonel-Klink accent (Harvey Keitel is particularly egregious). Disorientingly, Keitel periodically yells (in German-accented English) at the (English-speaking) Sonderkommandos to "stop speaking in Hungarian!" Then one of the (English-speaking) Hungarians says, "They don't speak German." Okay, wait a second -- was he saying that in English-German or English-Hungarian?]
After the movie, Joni and I discussed it and agreed we probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it's so unpleasant and depressing, but, artistically, it offers nothing to compensate. Unless you're a Holocaust denier -- or know someone who is -- skip this movie.
What is it
with all these depressing, pain-suffused movies coming out
now? Personally, I suspect the movie studios and distributors are
in sinister league with the pharmaceutical companies to make more
people
think they suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder by depressing them
as
the days start to shorten.
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