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.

Sidney Lumet has created some of the greatest movies in the history of cinema.  Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, and Serpico, among others.  And although he is nowhere near as prolific now as he was in his mid-70s heyday, he has shown, with The Devil Knows You’re Dead, that he’s still got it.  “It” being the ability to cast great actors and then coax them into terrific performances in tightly told stories on the big screen.  Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke have been better in other movies (Capote, Training Day), but they are definitely at the top of their game here.  They play brothers who are both sleeping with the same woman (Hoffman’s wife), played by Marisa Tomei.  And that means there is a lot of Marisa Tomei nudity, which can’t hurt a movie.  It also means that the movie opens with Philip Seymour Hoffman nudity, which is not an auspicious way to begin a film.

This is Hoffman’s third major movie released on DVD in two weeks (the others being The Savages and Charlie Wilson’s War), and he looks to be in the same kind of zone Gene Hackman once occupied.  That ability to appear in twelve movies a year and be fantastic in eleven of them.  Very few actors have ever pulled this off on the level of Hackman in the mid-seventies and Hoffman now.  The premise of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is that Hawke and Hoffman have planned a robbery of their parents’ jewelry store in the suburbs.  They know the store inside and out, the alarm system, the schedule, the safe combination.  It should be fairly easy, just go in with masks, take what you need at gunpoint, and leave.  Insurance covers the parents, and the brothers have 600 thousand bucks worth of jewels they can fence, and fix all their money troubles.

 The money troubles for Hawke involve child support payments he has to make.  And while he is a devoted father and loves his little girl, his ex-wife (Amy Ryan of Gone Baby Gone) is a horrible shrew who is attempting to take him for every penny she can.  Hoffman’s money troubles stem from a little bit of a darker reason - he has a drug problem, and there are some fairly creepy scenes of him shooting up in the apartment of a she-male drug dealer.  He is clearly stealing money from the company where he works to support his drug habit, and the IRS is about to do an audit which will flush him out any moment.  He needs the money to replace what he has stolen, and of course to continue taking drugs.  You know the end result of their armed robbery endeavour right away, as the robbery itself is the second scene in the movie.  The rest of the film spends it’s time telling the story of the days leading up to the robbery and the days and weeks following it.  As one would safely assume, nothing really goes as planned in this hold-up, because if it did, this movie would end fairly fast. 

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead was marketed as something of a “black comedy”, but there is very little funny about it.  There are some amusing parts when people react predictably to unpredictable situations, but overall there is very little humour.  Hoffman is terrific as the older brother, bullying and convincing and manipulating and wheedling until Hawke agrees to go through with the plan.  And Hawke is tremendous as the younger brother, who gets in over his head almost right away, and spends the rest of the movie trying to subdue his rising panic.  Eventually, there is a watershed moment, where all the tensions in this family come out.  Somehow, we get the sense that if this discussion had taken place twenty years earlier, none of the events of this film would have taken place.  However, this watershed moment affects everyone differently. 

 Albert Finney, who is great as the patriarch of the family, becomes obsessive to the point of insanity, seeking revenge.  Hoffman becomes obsessive to the point of insanity, hoping to cover up his involvement in the crime.  And Hawke seems to just shatter, losing whatever independance he ever had and blindly following Hoffman’s lead (which, given his state of mind, may not have been such a great idea).  This movie ends well.  Extremely well, I would say.  The final scenes give a sense of closure of one of the main threads of the story, while other threads are left hanging completely.  But somehow these loose ends feel better than a nice, neat package would have.  Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is very good, beginning to end.  It’s not a Lumet classic, it’s no Dog Day Afternoon or Network.  But it certainly shows that he is still a master at his craft.