TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/0108421.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.2 KB | 151 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 76

Hollywood on The Holocaust


Three holiday films recall the slaughter of European Jewry

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Open any volume of modern history, and the blood of
innocents pours onto your hands. From government policies of
starvation to countless varieties of religious wars, the 20th
century newspaper is one huge Domesday Book, a catalog of
horrors so vast that numbers lose human meaning. One death is
a tragedy; millions of deaths are statistics, to be deplored,
then filed away as nightmares beyond comprehension. The
atrocities nag at our conscience, finally numbing it. Amnesia
seems the only solace.

    So it is therapeutic to be reminded of the small stories of
heroism, brutality and survival that restore dimension to the
century's signature satanic event, the Nazi extermination of
European Jewry. What is unusual is that in this holiday season,
no fewer than three Hollywood films deal with the Holocaust.
Triumph of the Spirit tells the true tale of a Greek-Jewish
boxer, Salamo Arouch, who literally fights for his life at
Auschwitz. Music Box fictionalizes the 1988 trial of John
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who was convicted
of war crimes. And Enemies, a Love Story adapts Isaac Bashevis
Singer's 1966 novel about Holocaust survivors sorting out their
guilt and their passions in postwar New York City. Still, for
all their ambitions, this trio ends up as two honorable duds
and a near miss with plenty to recommend it.

    There are many reasons, aside from the personal commitment
of Jewish filmmakers, for Hollywood's preoccupation with the
Holocaust. It is one act of state terrorism that has been
exhaustively detailed. The first images of gas chambers and
mass graves in 1945 sickened the world, not just with their
charnel power but also with an awareness that the villains were
once torchbearers of Western civilization. Hitler upended the
cradle that had rocked Beethoven and Goethe, and hell fell out.
His murder of millions of people for the crime of being born
Jewish is an act worth pondering and mourning.

    And here is a maxim worth remembering: good motives do not
always make good movies. Too often Hollywood finds in the
Holocaust a familiar, convenient parable of sanctified
martyrdom and slavering sadism. Thorny issues are begged,
compelling stories avoided. The dark psychology of the
death-camp administrator, himself captive in a twisted chain of
command, is rarely investigated. Neither is the prisoner's
natural impulse to survive at any cost, which gave rise to "the
Jewish members of the GPU, the Capos, the thieves, speculators,
informers," as Singer describes them in Enemies, a Love Story.
Instead, characters are as reductive as in any old-time
western. The good guys wear the Star of David; the bad guys
wear swastikas. The real victim in these films is dramatic
ambiguity, and the result is what critic Art Spiegelman has
called "holokitsch."

    Triumph of the Spirit might be expected to transcend this
label, if only because of one line in the movie's final
credits: "Filmed on location at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camps." Co-producer Arnold Kopelson won permission
from Polish authorities to use the huge camps (now museums) as
the setting for his story. How chilling it must have been for
the actors and especially the extras -- many of them Auschwitz
survivors -- to see the place restored as if in full working
order.

    Yet how little of that dreadful impact comes across in the
film, which is too respectful of its subject to find more in
it than noble cliches. Salamo Arouch (Willem Dafoe), formerly
the Balkan middleweight champ, is interned with his family at
Birkenau and soon ordered to take part in boxing exhibitions
in which the loser will almost certainly be killed. This grisly
dilemma -- each of Arouch's knockouts sends his opponent to the
gas chamber -- is mostly evaded in Robert M. Young's bland
direction. The film's only and considerable virtue lies in its
documentation of the desperate strategies people devised to
stay alive in the death camps.

    Some lived even longer, to bear witness to atrocities and
bring the beasts to justice. In Music Box the accused is
Michael Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Hungarian now living
in Illinois. Was he the malefic Miska, who as a member of the
Arrow Cross during World War II raped women at gunpoint and
tossed bundles of Jews into the Danube? Laszlo's daughter Ann
(Jessica Lange), an attorney, believes her father is  innocent
and fiercely defends him in court. But the weight of survivors'
testimony is too heavy, too obscene, to dismiss. Can she
believe that her doting father committed such acts? And if she
does believe it, can she still love him?

    Laszlo must be guilty, of course; otherwise, there is no
drama. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Costa-Gavras
want to create that drama, but they do not give Ann a strong
case to argue, so the film's only suspense is in how long it
will take Lange (who gives a smart, sturdy perform ance) to
face the truth. Nor do they allow Laszlo a chance to justify,
however speciously, his rancid past. They are content to dwell
on the sins of the fathers, in which humanism stares at
bestiality across the generation gap. Even in a genial mood,
Laszlo sounds like a Nazi: "A healthy body makes a healthy
spirit," he huffs as he completes a maniacal regimen of
push-ups. Ann's father-in-law (Donald Moffat), who helped
relocate Nazis as a CIA agent after the war, is no more
enlightened. He derides the Holocaust as "the world's sacred
cow." He's not even sure it happened.

    Herman Broder (Ron Silver), the passive hedonist in director
Paul Mazursky's film of Enemies, a Love Story, is sure. There
must have been a Holocaust, or Herman would not have hidden
from it for most of the war. Now it is 1949, and he lives in
New York with, eventually, three loving women: his Polish
Gentile wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), whom he married
out of gratitude for protecting him in the old country; his
passionate mistress Masha (Lena Olin), whom the Holocaust has
driven to a volcanic indecision between childbearing and
suicide; and his long-lost first wife Tamara (Anjelica Huston),
whom he had thought dead in the camps.

    Herman's story could be played as brisk black comedy, an "I
Led Three Wives" with memories of death ever kibitzing in his
restless sleep. But Mazursky is scrupulously fair to the
characters -- so fair that Enemies lacks his films' customary
oomph. When it is not vitalized by the beautiful performances
of Olin and Huston, the picture takes on Herman's dithering
lassitude. And yet there is a method to this meandering.
Novelist and director both know a man is more than the sum of
the calamities that have befallen him. Herman is a victim, not
just of the Nazis, but of his own demons as well. And he is
lucky, or doomed, to find three superior women who want to
crush him in the bosom of their devotion.

    Singer wrote a Domesday Book in which the blood is bathed
in tears of conspiratorial laughter. Mazursky has made it into
a movie that sidesteps holokitsch with the spry deftness of a
Chagall peasant.