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.

Neverwas is a movie in the tradition of Hook and Bridge to Terabithia, where fantasy and reality intersect in some bizarre way. It stars Aaron Eckhardt, Brittany Murphy and Ian McKellan. This film was made in 2005, never hit the theatres, and finally gets it’s first release, courtesy of Alliance Films, on DVD. It’s the story of an imagined land called Neverwas. Like Narnia or Oz or Middle Earth, Neverwas exists only in a children’s book written by Nick Nolte. The star of this book is Zachary, Nolte’s son. While writing the book, Nolte is losing his mind, and gets sent to a mental institution. For the next few years, he made life very difficult for his family before dying a strange and unpleasant death. The movie picks up about thirty years later. The book is now a worldwide classic, and Nolte’s son is a grown man (Eckhardt). He is now a psychiatrist, who takes a job at the institute that once housed his father.

There are some other big names here. Notably Vera Farminga, who starred as the psychiatrist in The Departed and has become one of the most respected actresses in the business. But then, this film was made in 2005, before she was famous. And although the credits use her name, she has one line in the movie and maybe six seconds of screen time. Which indicates something about the film. Neverwas was made three years ago, but released only now. And they put a famous name in the credits, even though that person had very little to do with the movie. Maybe they are trying to compensate for something? Hide something? Like the fact that this movie is not very good? Well, it isn’t. In fact, it would be quite terrible without one key ingredient. Ian McKellan.

I like Brittany Murphy, she has a very charming and childlike innocence about her, which works well in this film. She plays a reporter who is doing a story on the phenomenon of Neverwas and the enigma that was it’s author. I also like Aaron Eckhardt, who has the sort of cocky arrogance that works in Thank You For Smoking, but not here. The two are supposed to be some kind of meant-for-each-other couple, but does that ever feel flat, and leads to a painfully contrived oh-my-god-she’s-really-a-reporter-and-I’m-furious scene. Then there’s a maudlin, staggeringly stupid scene where Eckhardt reveals that he BLAMES himself for his father’s DEATH! But thankfully, right when each of these terrible scenes gets so obnoxious that you want to give up on the movie altogether, here comes Ian McKellan again, and things pick right back up.
McKellan plays a patient at the mental hospital who believes that he is the king of the actual land of Neverwas. He is magnificently looney, a wonderfully deranged old man but…is he maybe telling the truth? Is Neverwas…actually real? I won’t reveal the details there, but the journey to that point is terrific. Without McKellan, this movie would be incredibly awful. But whenever he’s on the screen, the film has a certain electricity which is well worth watching. McKellan is one of the greatest actors working today, and although he will likely be remembered for playing Magneto more than any other character, he has done wonderful work in many fine films. And some otherwise horrible ones, like Neverwas.

It’s clear why this didn’t get a theatrical release. It’s too old for kids and too young for adults and too cheesy for cynical teenagers. And what happens to good movies that are too old for kids and too young for everyone else? They go direct to DVD. Apparently, so too do the bad ones.