The Zone of Interest

One of the central tenets of Jean-Luc Godard’s work and criticism in his mid-to-later period was that cinema had failed because it did not capture the horror of the concentration camps in the Holocaust and as a result, could not prevent them.  To witness such a horror feels untenable, and for Godard, the recreation of the act was morally indefensible.  Though his own complicated background is endlessly dissected (from a middle-class Swiss family, likely antisemitic given the times and region, conflated with his later political awakening which featured his vocally pro-Palestinian views beginning in the 70s, one can only imagine the accusations leveled with every new project), his belief in this failure of cinema was resolute and would come up time and time again, not least of which in 2001’s In Praise of Love, where his many critiques of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List come together in a scene involving agents for the director asking to buy people’s life stories for profit.  

It is a gross simplification to suggest that recreations of the most atrocious act of the 20th century can only be exploitative, though it’s certainly a conversation worth having, and though one could follow that argument that all depictions of historical cruelty are also exploitative (Godard might argue that the special case here is cinema’s failure to film it in the first place), there is some weight to the notion when considering Schindler’s List as an excuse to depict the horrors of the holocaust by hanging it on a story about some dubious degree of human triumph (Spielberg would later use the same tactic in Saving Private Ryan, where the clear draw was the bravura and nauseating D-Day sequence but then needing to hang it on a typical Men on a Mission War Movie).  The counter might be Laszlo Nemes’ 2015’s Son of Saul, a gritty account of Auschwitz that is obsessed with the personal experience of atrocity, it mostly elides the Hollywoodization of the event, even as it still heads towards an optimistic/humanist ending of (failed) resistance.  This, too, feels dubious.  

There’s no easy answer, and on some level, it might just come down to how individuals feel after each experience, itself a complicated criteria of self questioning (Do you feel you understand human cruelty? What happened to the Jewish people? What of complicity in antisemitism? Was this the equivalent of eating vegetables to feel like a more well rounded person?  Do you empathise?).  I bring this all up because it’s central to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, an adaptation of a Martin Amis novel (though mostly taken from firsthand accounts and transposed onto the actual Auschwitz rather than the novel’s fictional camp and characters).  This film follows commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller, having a banner year between this and Anatomy of a Fall), and their family as they go about their day to day lives in their home and garden, which abuts the walls of Auschwitz.  It never once goes inside the camp, leaving the horrors to the sound design, the visual of smoke out of the stack, and occasional reminders invading the lives of the Hoss’s family (whether intentional, as in gold and clothing stripped from the victims, or unintentional, as when outwash from the camp disrupts a river excursion).  Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” comment springs to mind rather quickly with the film’s dead eyed depiction of minor housework and gardening existing right next to the camp. In some circles, the film been criticized for essentially being one note and better summed up in that phrase than in anything in the 100 minutes Glazer puts on screen.  This does a disservice, as does the critique that the film is painting the Hoss’ as “just like you and me”.  They are clearly not just going about their business, nor are they blank ciphers for the audience to project upon.  

Even forgetting that one of the early scenes of Hedwig involves her distributing and then trying on confiscated clothing, Huller’s most emotional performance comes when Rudolf finally tells her he’s being transferred out of Auschwitz.  Her anger at him, and the threat of losing this large country house with a garden they’ve longed for since they were young (presumably her family did not fare well in the Weimar).  That scene results in a burst of anger at underlings that happens twice; here developing, in one of the best uses of subtle storytelling all year, from two girls fresh from the pool dripping in a hallway.  The other great outburst against a servant comes after a relative who has been invited to stay at the house is too disturbed by the goings-on to stay, and leaves without saying goodbye.  These people are determined to have their definition of a good life, no matter how it’s achieved, and while we get a resentment and dehumanization of Jewish people as implicit, the emphasis is on their striving for success (relatable), and the ways in which they hope to attain it (not all relatable).  They are bad people, even if their wants and desires are no different from most.  

This is not a film with one idea stretched out to feature length.  There is nuance in the performances, there is subtlety in the script (as much as there is one), and there is a radical formalism in its technique, and they all point to gradations of an idea, but it is not a simple idea, in notion or presentation.  The greater question is, how tasteful is this?  Schindler’s List uses a classical Hollywood framework to tell us a story, and adorns it with atrocities in the hopes that we’ll be moved in the way a traditional movie might move us.  Son of Saul uses urgent realism in the hopes of making us “experience” the tragedy, though this is not possible and probably more to what Godard had issues with when it came to Hollywood depictions.  Documentaries like Night and Fog  and Shoah are still probably the best cinematic avenues for learning and considering the horrors of the Holocaust, but that’s basically a different medium in this regard (and please seek out Godard and Lanzmann discussions on the topic if you can).  Zone of Interest is in less morally dubious territory as there’s no visual depiction of the horror, but through its sound design and its measured camerawork, it’s punctuated with visceral moments.  Mostly, however, it’s a film that forces you to sit with it and, whether you want to or not, contemplate.  It edges close to being an artistic intellectual exercise, and your mileage will vary on how well it works.  I, for one, couldn’t help but see a relatively happy family frolicking in a garden and splashing in a pool next to a giant wall that barely concealed an atrocity without thinking of Israel and Palestine, especially as we are currently in the midst of a genocide.  The irony is not lost on me, and whether intended or not, the simple facts invite it.  We can never and should never attempt to recreate the greatest act of inhumanity in a history with no shortage of inhumanities, and while I don’t know that a movie can teach us the “why” of something like the Holocaust, the highest praise I can give The Zone of Interest is that it invites us to try to understand, and in its quiet spaces, provokes us to consider if we’ve learned anything from it at all. 

Avatar: The Way of Water

Thirteen long years ago, I wrote of the original Avatar  “…I’m glad the technology is here, and I really am excited for somebody to do something worthwhile with it.  Demo reels are all fine and good, but they’re a cheap appetiser rather than a nourishing meal.” The more things change etc etc…

The promise of the tech in that movie, seemingly a culmination of a shift in visual effects from The Matrix in 1999 up through the handily 10 year mark of 2009 never fully came to fruition.  In fact, the entire industry has been upended in ways some saw coming (the retrenchment of studios into massively budgeted IP and cutting out mid-budget movies in the process) and in ways most didn’t (streaming has effectively destroyed the business model, accelerated by the pandemic).  Beyond that, the state of visual effects – whilst marginally increasing in quality – has been hampered by the crunch time put onto the artists by franchise schedules determined 7 years out.  Marvel has to hit its dates, after all.  On top of that, the rise the of large, cheap TVs for the home as well as streaming services has led to a decrease in cinematographic quality meant to flatten the image and neutralise extreme colours to look better in home, which is where most people will watch these films.  Though Avatar remains the highest grossing movie of all time, second now goes to Avengers: Endgame, not because of its effects or its filmmaking spectacle, but arguably because it’s the culmination of a decade-long project that has continued on, however shakily.  Other than that, however, the quality blockbusters of the last decade that aren’t about seeing quippy characters we’ve watched for years came down to Mad Max: Fury Road and the two Tom Cruise projects of Mission: Impossible and the impossibly popular Top Gun: Maverick, both of which adhere to an old school ethos of star power and practical effects.  All those films distinguish themselves by using real live stunts and as many in-camera effects as possible.  In a way, the classic art of filmmaking has pushed the best artists to practical effects, whilst the freeing nature of CGI advances has led to an assembly line of indie directors thrust into Marvel franchise properties with pre-rendered action sequences out of their control almost entirely.  The promise of visual effects has left us with something ugly and unimaginative, with audiences subconsciously able to tell when the ethos on set was “we’ll fix it in post”.  

Re-enter the picture Mr. James Cameron, here to set us all right.  If the years since the original Avatar saw practical effects being favoured by those with a classical style, then it falls to Cameron to make the case for what’s possible with digital effects.  Avatar: The Way of Water is even more digitally heavy than the original, and I’d imagine that a significant chunk of this movie features no practical effects at all.  The idea of Virtual Film Production differentiates it from a purely CG animated movie a la Pixar, and one of the reasons for the time and budget was developing a camera system that could perform motion capture underwater.  They could have just mimicked it or gone pure digital creation but the idea of anchoring the CGI world in real performances and real camera movement is what differentiates this from the weightlessness of so many CGI extravaganzas.  The tech is nothing short of astonishing.  The textures of the skin and the water are astounding, the alien animals look spectacular, and there’s nothing harder than making something completely fictional look like a real (sometimes, ironically, evoking practical Stan Winston-like puppets) creature.  There truly is nothing like it.  About a quarter of a way through the film, I had the same thought I had during the first, which is “we’re using this tech…on this?”  But then a little while went by and I had an about face, thinking “why not this?”.  

All of which leads us to the story, which is about as simplistic as the original.  One could make the argument that Cameron dealing in archetypes and cliches simplifies the storytelling which makes this whole venture far more appealing to international audiences, although I’d counter that George Miller wanted Fury Road to have no dialogue at all to appeal overseas, believing in his ability to communicate complex interpersonal relationships and larger themes through pure filmmaking, and I believe he would have succeeded as that movie relies on wordless glances and cuts to define its characters.  This is a pretty simple film, all in all, and I let out an audible chuckle when the Sully family arrives at a different tribe to seek refuge, and we immediately get a shot of one of the sons looking at a girl walking slowly onto the shore.  There is no cliche left on the table here, and while it mostly works, when it thuds, it thuds hard.  This is all typical James Cameron though.  He’s a gearhead and a visual storyteller extraordinaire, and when this movie kicks off, it is something else.  We can pick apart the way he views family structures, and that this movie is about fathers and sons and mothers are weirdly left in the background except to get vengefully angry, or how much he hates humans (deliciously, I should say), or his intriguing love-hate relationship with military culture and hardware. This movie is bloated, and could probably shave at least 30 minutes or so, but it still moves.  If you can push through some brief sequences of bad dialogue and obvious character set up, you’re quickly rewarded with some new spectacular visuals or a tight and wonderfully constructed action sequence.  Everyone’s mileage may vary though, as with the first one, on how much of the nonsense they’re willing to put up with and still come away getting lost in the world.  Cameron shows his age and era by leaning hard into a simplistic, new age environmentalism as well as evoking Vietnam era soldiers torching villages with flamethrowers as though anyone under the age of 30 will understand the references.  The main bad guys are poachers, and though still a real threat in the world, feels more akin to The Rescuers Down Under or Ferngully than 2022.  

If you can handle all the nonsense, it’s truly something to behold.  It’s not a great story but it’s great storytelling from a technical perspective, and once again I’m left with the wonder of what could be done with this technology.  The difference between now and 2009 is that, aside from maybe I’m just getting softer in age, I realize how rare it is for someone to pick up the baton and do something with the promise of the first one.  And in an age where corporations have taken over the studios, and they rely on the surest bets possible, making gargantuan action movies with equally gargantuan budgets while cutting out everything else fo the sake of the bottom line, and in the process still fail regularly to produce any kind of awe-inspiring spectacle, I’ll take whatever Avatar: The Way of Water is giving with open arms because 13 years on, I appreciate the rarity of it.  

-M

Malcolm and Marie

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes, but “necessity” means something drastically different from one person to the next, often depending on circumstances.  Sam Levinson’s idea to make a film during quarantine, using the limitations inherent with early COVID protocols, no doubt felt like something worth doing just for the challenge.  His scope in Assassination Nation and his TV series Euphoria is, if not epic, fairly sprawling.  So shooting a two-hander in one location must have seemed like a thrilling challenge.  Levinson is, of course, the son of noted director Barry Levinson, and while it’s deeply unfair to cast assumptions because of lineage, one gets the impression he never had to deal with the same limitations of budget, time, size, and scope that, say, a scrappy independent filmmaker with no lineage or entrance into the industry had to get their career going.  This is readily apparent in the subject matter of Malcolm and Marie, the film he conceived with his Euphoria star Zendaya, pitched to Netflix, and hastily wrote and filmed over two weeks with a crew of 22.  

Quarantine Watch: All That Jazz

Remarkably, the works of Bob Fosse have so far escaped me.  I’m acutely aware of his importance to Broadway musicals, a discipline which I have never fully embraced.  I also saw Cabaret when I was a teenager, foolishly catching up on Best Picture winners as though that would give me a worthwhile head start on film history.  I don’t recall much of it, and it’s certainly due a rewatch.  Of his other works, I’ve only seen parts of the much lauded Star 80, though I’ve always taken that film to have earned its reputation during the rise of film twitter.  I am aware of the stature of All That Jazz, but perhaps some interdisciplinary snobbery on my part led me to sit on it for a very long time.

Quarantine Watch: La Dolce Vita

During quarantine, I’ll be occasionally writing for 30 minutes on any film I happen to watch.  Today is La Dolce Vita, spurred on by a crossword question.

Having never fully embraced Fellini, other than a few notable films, including this one, I realized I hadn’t seen La Dolce Vita in its entirety since I was in my early 20s.  It was a film I actually watched semi-frequently owing to it being one of the few DVDs I owned when I first moved overseas.  It’s the most famous film from one of the most famous directors in history, so there’s not much I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said time and time again over the decades, including in Roger Ebert’s fantastic Great Movies essay on it from the 90s. 

Jojo Rabbit

Blaming marketing campaigns is cheap knock on any product, certainly art, but JoJo Rabbit’s claim that it is an “anti-hate satire” gets at the core of the problem with the film:  It is not a satire.  Sure, there are mildly satirical elements tossed around (maybe Stephen Merchant’s Gestapo officer or the Rebel Wilson’s ridiculous Hitler Youth instructor), but overall, this is just Fascist iconography played broadly to give some element of stakes to a pretty simple and frankly insipid story of young love and overcoming prejudice. 

Scattered Thoughts on Us

 

There will be spoilers, so go see the movie before you read any further.  The movie is definitely worth seeing.

Alita: Battle Angel

There’s a type of film that is so in love with its source material it can’t get out of it’s own way.  Alita: Battle Angel is one such film.  After many, many years in development, initially by James Cameron (I recall thinking Luc Besson’s Angel-A was some type of adaptation because it was in the news at the time), and now finally brought to the screen from his script by Robert Rodriguez, it is very clearly a film that has suffered from overthinking.  It’s a property doomed to failure in a lot of ways, and though I have absolutely no knowledge of the manga from which it is adapted, I’d imagine it doesn’t lend itself to easy adaptation. 

Alita (Rosa Salazar) is a 300 year old cyborg found in a scrap heap and brought back to life by cybernetic surgeon Ido (Christoph Waltz).  She meets a guy, there are bounty hunters, ne’er do well scientists struggling with loss, a gargantuan cyborg baddie, an underworld (literally, in this case) kingpin, a violent sport called Motorball, a grieving mother who has sold herself out to get back to the good place, and a shadowy overlord living in the sky.  There is a lot going on here.  If I could hazard a guess, the creators didn’t know how much they could get away with or, more precisely, how many movies they would get to pull out of the property, and as a result, there are about 9 different stories all given short shrift in such a jarring fashion that it’s impossible to get your grounding.  It’s difficult enough to establish an entire world without feeling like you’re intentionally holding back information to fill out the details, and it’s another thing entirely to try to cram everything into two hours.  It’s a rare case in modern cinema where a 6 hour Netflix series would have been preferable, but this is one. 

The set pieces are good enough that I have to assume they were the starting point, and the job of the writers was to fill in the gaps to get to them.  It feels creaky as hell because of this, and it results in an early ominous warning from Ido to Alita never to pay attention to Motorball to, 90 minutes later and with absolutely no character development on his part to signal a change in ethos, he’s happily suiting her up with custom skates to join the league.  The visuals are striking at times, even if early scenes of Christoph Waltz hunting down a Jack the Ripper type killer with a giant hammer made me wish there was a Bloodborne movie instead.  The set pieces really are quite something, and Salazar’s CGI Alita is sympathetic enough that I want to root for the movie to work.  Unfortunately there are about four too many climaxes and endless interstitial scene handwaving to ever get fully on board.  It’s half assed and corny and punctuated with arresting visuals so, basically, it’s the ultimate Robert Rodriguez movie.  Bill Pope’s cinematography should be singled out for the sheer range of styles that have to be accomplished in a single film, but other than that an Alita’s genuinely affecting character, it’s a mess.  If it was shorn down to a few of its plot lines, it might have worked.  Instead, we get a team of talented people whose reach far exceeded their grasp.

Annihilation

Well trodden territory in some ways, and yet also utterly unique in it’s derivations for a (US, at least) theatrical release, Alex Garland’s Annihilation is the kind of messy, intriguing, and at times utterly enthralling science fiction that drives me to consider it beyond the walls of the multiplex even as I’m sure much of it doesn’t hold up.  A (very loose, from what I’ve been told) adaptation of the first of the Southern Reach trilogy of novels by Jeff VanderMeer, the film sees Natalie Portman as an ex-army biologist thrust into a top secret base in Florida after her presumed dead special forces husband returns home after a year absence before promptly spewing blood all over the back of an ambulance.  The base is observing a phenomenon called “The Shimmer”, based on the fact that it, well, shimmers the color spectrum.  She volunteers to join a team that’s potentially on a suicide mission to venture into The Shimmer to better understand it’s peculiar affect on everything around it, especially as the “everything around it” is expanding rapidly.  Things go Stalker pretty quickly, with ample time for brief bouts of the sci-fi horror Garland has ventured in previously in his screenplays for Sunshine and 28 Days Later. 

Dunkirk

Though an inspirational story of true heroism against almost impossible odds, I can’t say I’ve ever been too keen to see a movie about the famous rescue at Dunkirk.  Though it’s etched in history due to its strategic importance (survival of the army meant survival of Britain and the Allies) as well as the famous Churchill speech it inspired, a film version lends itself too easily to ponderous patriotism and hokey sentimentalism.  It also seems quite boring.  I get the impression, having now seen Christopher Nolan’s depiction, that he probably felt the same way – at least, about the boring bit.