Bizarre as it sounds, for a movie I really didn't like that much, I'm going to be writing a lot about it.
Mainly so I can empty my head with all of the thoughts, good and mostly bad, swimming around my head about it.
Two subject matters shown a lot in film and media in general that show the worst of humanity- The Holocaust and slavery. Both are subjects we were still learning from and aspiring to be better people by not repeating past mistakes. And this is by no means an editorial about how we should stop doing movies on these dark corners of human history.
If anything, this is my critique on how "The Zone of Interest" sort of missed the mark telling its Holocaust era story. At least it did when I was actually watching it. Afterwards, that's an entirely different story.
Here's the basic premise:
The movie follows the family of a notable SS officer. Their home is situated in the country outside Auschwitz, arguably the most famous of the concentration camps, if not the most well-known one. And basically, they're maintaining a typical everyday life indifferent to the atrocities happening just on the other side of the tall fences and barbed wire.
It shows the family dynamic between the officer and his wife and their commonplace struggles. But it also shows him doing his job without us really seeing him in a day in his work life.
The biggest issue I have this movie in general-- despite the muted palettes of colors used throughout the movie and the plainness of how the characters look (except when Rudolf is in uniform), it very much feels like Jonathan Glazer chose style over substance.
It was a foreign film where there were subtitles, but it also had that cringey artsy feel to it.
I'm not joking- there are 3 moments in the movie where there's a screen devoid of any visual and it stays that way for a long time. Imdb had the minutes- the first 5 minutes is a black screen with droning intense music. There's a midpoint where they show a bunch of flowers in the garden and it ends with the screen being washed over with red and it's a solid red for 20 seconds. Then before the credits roll- a black scroll with intense music. No time stamp on this one, but I expected to see a postscript of some kind, only to be disappointed and further disillusioned.
There's also two night scenes where this girl is planting fruit in the ground- the scenery is black but you can see the outline of some objects and she and the fruit are ghostly white. Because this occupied the scenes where Rudolf is reading bedtime stories, I didn't know if this was a nightmare sequence or it was actually happening. It was the latter, supposedly. I just didn't want it to give me nightmares once I got through this movie because it was spooky.
This movie won 2 Oscars. One was for Sound and that was the part I really didn't like. One too many moments where a single note was held way too long. I get that the point was to make the audience uncomfortable. But it accomplished it in probably the way they didn't intend. It's sort of like uncomfortable silences in conversation that go on way too long. The movie is an hour and 46 minutes, but I was thinking through some of these scenes-- this could've been edited out or shortened.
As for the movie itself... I was just bored. At one point I even fell asleep because I was waiting for some dramatic turn of events to happen. There was no plot at all. The closest thing we had to it was Rudolf and Hedwig talking about his transfer to another camp and how she doesn't want to uproot their family to move with him... since they have the "perfect" country life where they are. He ultimately grants her this request.
None of the characters are really interesting to spend time with or to even look at. Although for a movie like this, it'd be sending the wrong message if they cast well-known or at least good looking people to play the roles. Everyone was very plain looking and there was no dynamic range at all.
Oddly enough, I got more out of this movie reading about it afterwards than actually watching it.
We never see the atrocities firsthand but there are a little hints of it sprinkled throughout. Some were more obvious than others. The ones not so obvious, it was shocking to read.
There were two scenes where there was a lot of washing and sanitizing. The first is the children swimming in the river by the house, their father finds human remains in the river and they're immediately brought back and scrubbed to the bone. I knew the significance of what he found, but it took me a while to realize they were scrubbing because it was Jewish remains, not just human remains. Then there's another scene where he commits adultery with an inmate and the scene after, he's cleaning away the "filth." Nothing graphic is shown, but it was still a moment that made me think.
Two things I saw early on in the movie and completely missed the significance. At one point, Hedwig is trying on a fine fur coat and the lipstick inside it. Then she gives it to a maid to have washed and the lining fixed. I thought maybe that the wife was actually one of the maids and she didn't want to get caught wearing the wife's clothes. Nope-- I completely missed the fact the coat had been taken from one of the Jewish prisoners.
Then a scene later where the two boys are playing with a bunch of teeth. Again, I didn't recognize until reading about it that they were gold teeth taken from prisoners.
The last time I saw anything relating to the Holocaust was in college- 2008- so there were a lot of things associated with that time I forgot about.
The callousness did show well in the scenes where Rudolf was talking about the design for the Final Solution in the camps. How "loads" would be moved from one scene to the next and later "reloaded." And he says it so casually like he's doing dirty laundry. :cringe:
The phrase "banality of evil" repeated in nearly every review I read. To the point, I got sick of reading it over and over again.
The movie showed that off well, but did the movie itself have to be so banal or so boring to watch?
I realize these aren't characters you're supposed to like or support. But I just kept thinking- why should I care about these people? I see movies for a compelling story or memorable characters and it succeeded in neither of these.
The best part might have been the ending- where we transition from a Nazi party to the same building in present day now being a museum. Where there were people, there's several exhibits of shoes and clothing taken from Jews. Portraits on all the walls of the people who were murdered in this facility.
Going into this movie, I kinda thought that it was a regular German family living outside the camp and accepting they're living next to these horrible chimneys where the air always smiles of burning flesh... I didn't know it was going to be the family of SS.
Or that this was even based on an actual person.
Other reviews had said that this movie was "inspired" by the book of the same name, but not "based" on it. Jonathan Glazer, the director, just took the idea and did his own thing with it.
Anyway, to cut to the end of all this, the real Rudolf Hoss was sentenced at Nuremburg and later executed. And his wife never denounced or showed regret for what they did.
I suppose they really just wanted this message to sink in, but for me, I think I would've preferred some sort of postscript. Just so I feel like some sort of "story" had been actually told here.
In my Holocaust class in college, we saw a couple of films. Mostly the propaganda films. But the one that stuck with me the most was "The Grey Zone." It showed the atrocities in the camps, people getting sent to gas chambers. Then the people working in the camp (one being David Arquette) find a girl who survived it and they try to keep her hidden from their superiors. In the end, she is found out and she's told to run to the exit... the movie cuts to black and ends there. To this day, I still don't know if they let her escape or she'd been shot.
I was numb for a couple of days after that-- it genuinely broke something inside me. Thankfully at that point, I made some friends at school and being with them helped me get past all that.
That's the type of reaction I expected to get from "The Zone of Interest," but instead I found myself being so un-interested in it... I kept thinking I should change the channel and find something else, but I wanted to see if it got better... it never really did.
Not saying the movie is bad. I can objectively say it succeeded on some levels in sending its message. I just didn't like it and I wouldn't want to see it again. And that's perfectly acceptable.
Steven Spielberg called this the best Holocaust movie since his own- meaning "Schindler's List." I have yet to see that one and one day, I really should... I'm sure it'll fall more in line with what I expect from a movie on this subject matter.
