Cynical Cinema

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Going into Rendition, I was a little worried. I have read many many reviews suggesting that this film was not a good one. On rottentomatoes.com, James Berardinelli writes: “We are ambushed by a simplistic storyline that’s more interested in sermonizing and demonizing than existing in the real world where things aren’t as clear-cut as the movie would like us to believe.” Richard Roeper says: “I don’t fault Rendition for its liberal politics. I fault it for hammering home those politics in such pounding, slanted fashion.” And Todd McCarthy says: “Even [Reese] Witherspoon, normally the most spirited of performers who can inject even limited characters and blah scripts with her own spark, can do little but mope around and search for different ways to look worried.” Well, they are wrong. All wrong. Yes, Rendition tends to be a little melodramatic. And yes, it has left-leaning politics, but who can be upset by that? Other than Jerry Falwell? Those politics are indeed heavy-handed, and they are indeed pounded home in a slanted fashion, but then the movie ends, and…are they really?

The critics appear to be divided along the same lines that divide people over Meher Arar. The people who believe he was indeed unjustly imprisoned, and those who think “oh, the government’s just doing their job”. Rendition is basically a story about a guy much like Arar, who is detained by the American government after a terrorist attack and then extradited to another country to be tortured into giving up information. But does he really know this information? Or is he an innocent man held without trial without any recourse and with no access to a lawyer or a phone to call his wife to say he is OK? And frankly, if this is what happened to Arar, the 10.5 million dollars he got from the government is not even close to enough. People complain, like he won the lottery just for being tortured, but those people are basing their opinions on media reports which are of course conflicting. Very few people would know the real story there. Like, Arar and three government officials. Everything else is conjecture, and having an opinion one way or the other is more than likely based on the opinion of someone who really doesn’t know the whole story.

And while Rendition is certainly a condemnation of the American practice of detaining people without trial and throwing due process out the window. But it makes sure that by the end of the movie, there is a certain ambiguity, where the people watching the film can make their own decision about what took place, a decision that more than likely will be based on their existing prejudices. I don’t want to reveal the ending here, but it is far more ambiguous than you would assume. Rendition is not terribly complicated, but it treads along much the same ground as the very-complicated Syriana. Think of Rendition as the poor man’s Syriana. Whereas George Clooney’s movie was intricate and almost inexplicable, (and was, in fact, better than this one) Rendition is far more straight-forward, far easier to understand. But Rendition is thought-provoking in a similar way to Syriana. Even if a man is guilty, is it worth torturing him to find out? If the torture of that one man will create ten more who become enemies of your country?

I agree with Dennis Schwartz, who says that this movie deserves to be commended just for being made. It does. And Reese Witherspoon, who is one of my least favourite actresses, is terrific. As the pregnant wife of the imprisoned man, she hits all the right notes. Yes, she spends a lot of the movie just looking concerned. She’s pregnant. It becomes clear throughout the film that she has only so much energy. She works endlessly, but most of the time she is doing this by fighting through intense fatigue, which leaves her with no option but to sit and look despondent. And during the melodramatic scenes, she is believable in that she can all of a sudden get a burst of energy to confront her husband’s captors, and her emotions carry her away and she dissolves into a shrieking blubbery mess. But you know, I still believe that. After all, she’s pregnant. Jake Gyllenhall could have been better in his role as the American assigned to the interrogation, and I wish Meryl Streep had more screen time as the icy woman in charge of the rendition. And yes, the final scene between Gyllenhall and the torture victim is a little far-fetched and melodramatic.

But these are small quibbles with an otherwise excellent film. I would guess that hard line right-wingers will hate this film, because they will see it as the terrorists winning, or they will see it as questioning something that ought to be beyond reproach. But thoughtful, regular people will just enjoy it for what it is - a thought-provoking, interesting, very good film. I definitely recommend watching Rendition. It comes out from Alliance Films on Tuesday, February 19th.

Robert Redford is an excellent film director.  Although he doesn’t get enough credit for it.  Quiz Show was one of the most under-rated films of the past fifteen years, as was The Milagro Beanfield War before that.  Just about the only Redford-directed film to get the credit it deserved was Ordinary People.  And likely, Lions For Lambs will fall into the same category, and be compeletely overlooked in the coming years.  The main problem with the movie is that despite the star power, (Tom Cruise, Redford, Meryl Streep), nobody saw this film, and it is likely that now it’s out on DVD, not that many more people will see it.  You see, it is a message movie, and this is the year with more message movies, and less people watching them, than ever before.  Thirty years from now, people will still likely know In The Valley of Elah, as I am convinced it will be considered classic down the line.  But other films, like Redacted and Lions For Lambs will fall into the also-ran category when message films are remembered years from now.

 Which is not to say Lions Foir Lambs is bad, it just doesn’t compare to In The Valley of Elah.  There are some great performances in the movie, and some great dialogue, but that’s about all there is.  There are three different stories being told, all of which are connected in some way.  Tom Cruise is playing a part for which he would appear to be typecast - a smarmy, sleazy Republican senator who has come up with a new military strategy to “win” the war in Afghanistan for the U.S.  He is detailing his plan to a skeptical reporter (Streep), who feels as though she has heard all this “hearts and minds” rhetoric before, and has a hard time believing anything the man says.  Streep is great, as always, as this woman who is both captivated by the senator’s personal charizma yet repulsed by his politics.  The problem in these scens is Cruise, however, as his dialogue doesn’t give him much to work with, and he comes off as an almost cartoonish political figure of questionable ethics.  It doesn’t take a genius reporter to see through him or his Vietnam-type rhetoric, we can all see it, since it is so obvious on the screen.

 The second scenario is the direct result of Cruise’s military strategy, which basically uses American soldiers as bait to flush out the Taliban.  Two soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in the mountains of Afghanistan, with the enemy closing in.  And the third scenario is Robert Redford, as a university professor, reminiscing about two of his most promising, brilliant students.  The same two who are now trapped in Afghanistan.  This is a short movie, and it gives equal time to each of the three set pieces, which are, for the most part, well written.  Especially Redford’s exchange with a student who is not living up to his potential, which is poignant and intelligent.  However, there is nothing else happening in the movie.  Once the military has mobilized their helicopters to take the soldiers where they are going, there is no more movement.  Just three scenes in three locations, cutting in and out of each other.

 Doc watched this on the plane on the way back from his vacation, and he felt it was a left-wing propaganda piece.  It isn’t.  The intention of this film is not to be anti-republican, or anti-neocon, although it certainly comes off that way at times.  The intention of this film is to provoke thought, and that’s it.  The left-wingers will identify with Redford, who tries to convince his two students not to sign up for the army.  The right-wingers will identify with the two soldiers, whose reasons for enlisting are well thought out and make sense.  It has become the fashion to accuse a movie of being propaganda when it has a left-wing slant.  But how can a movie about Iraq or Afghanistan NOT have a left-wing slant when it deals with facts?  What would people call a film about Iraq where the “surge was working”, and the Iraqi people loved the American soldiers, and none of those civilians died, and everything was roses and kittens and victory?  Now THAT would be propaganda.